Title : The roles of a new strand of rural women’s collectives in the adoption of agricultural technologies in rural areas of Africa: The case of IR-VICOBAs in Morogoro, Tanzania
Abstract:
Collectives are increasingly becoming the cornerstone in assisting women in the global South. This article focuses on a new strand of women’s collective entitled Inter-Religious Village Community Bank (IR- VICOBA). The fundamental core values of IR-VICOBA are love, peace, and solidarity. The collectives encourage members, among other things, to avoid violence among communities, to respect human dignity, to promote religious tolerance, to educate children, to teach children their faith, to promote gender equality and equity, to stop husband wife or wife husband battering, to protect environment, and to live a life of integrity. Using a cross-sectional research design, the study has explored the contribution of IR-VICOBAs in facilitating the adoption of agricultural technologies for increasing agricultural productivity among rural women smallholder farmers. The key question is what are the technologies that rural women smallholder farmers learn and adopt from IR-VICOBAs to increase their agricultural productivity? Overall, IR-VICOBAs have facilitated the adoption by the rural women of the following agricultural technologies: drip irrigation farming, proper post-harvest handling, proper use of fertilizers, proper use of agricultural information from mobile phones, appropriate choice of context specific agricultural inputs, estimation of input to purchase, proper use of pesticides, proper spacing, utilization of farm machinery, value addition, utilization of weather information to farming, and soil testing. It is strongly that IR-VICOBA should be upscaling to other regions of Tanzania to facilitate the delivery of agricultural technologies to smallholder farmers.
