is it ok
Explanation:
The main thrust of the women's development activities would be to assist women in the sustainable establishment of income generating activities to be undertaken in or near the home. in some pilot villages. This could be also one of the main objectives of the self-help female groups formed with the support of the Project through its reinforcement of group promotion activities. IGAs tend to give women a higher status within the family and studies generally indicate that the greater the amount of income under women's control the greater amount devoted to their children's education. heath and nutrition. As previously mentioned generally incomes of women are used for the increase of the well being of the family. However it is essential to guarantee that women will have the control of the funds (saving funds loans etc) and the free disposal of them to implement IGAs. During the feasibility study project staff should be very careful on not raised expectations.
As we have previously focused on, the identification of income generating activities should come from a bottom up approach. An IGA should correspond to the needs of women, the failure of this kind of project generally comes from a gap between identifying women's needs and designing viable project. This means that it may be implemented after some steps have already been carried out with the Project's support like: PRA with women to identify problems, elaboration of a negotiated development programme, group promotion. All these activities should be carried out using participatory methods. In this context and according to the suggested strategy, it seems more appropriate to focus on planning, organizing and supporting IGAs than to give a list of activities. Furthermore the following reasons make that the suggestion of potential IGAs should be taken with caution and in any case should not be considered as an exhaustive list:
- the consultant spent no more than a few hours in the villages and several meetings were hold with only a few women who were not always representative of the community's women at village level;
- in most cases women were not aware of the objectives of the meeting;
- the presence of many official responsibles (most of them male) at the meetings did not facilitate the discussions:
- only' a few villages were visited in the Project areas.
1 - Potential income generating activities
To the benefits for women, IGAs to be supported should be those traditionally undertaken by women, and located in or near the home. Potential IGAs should concern activities where women can use skills they already possess. Rural women have skills to do small-scale plant and agricultural and animal production, processing and preservation. Areas for potential promotion include home gardens (aromatic and medicinal plants and herbs vegetables), indoor plants, flowers, fruit tree nurseries, animal production dairy products, sewing, knitting embroidering, carpet making. Of course potentialities are various according, to the specific conditions of the village. Marketing must be careful!! considered before undertaking any of these rural enterprises since lack of marketing expertise is the major weakness of this kind of programme.
1) Food drying. processing and preservation
In many rural households women are seasonally involved with these activities, especially in Jordan. They preserve surplus production for household consumption and for marketing when the family needs more cash. However, the regular production of a standardized product for the market is still rare and a wide of local products which could be produced are absent. Most notable of these are:
- dried fruit, vegetables and herbs
In Jordan the solar drying of fruit and vegetables is restricted to a few minor crops such as chilies, usually for household consumption. However vegetables such as tomatoes. eggplants can be dried, as well as many fruit, such as figs, grapes, apricots and peaches. The market for these is as yet poorly developed but the world market is expanding every year. There is also a large market for edible and medicinal herbs which remains poorly supplied from local sources.
- processed fruit and vegetable
Production of jams, pickles, vegetable pastes, fruit juices could all increase farm income and women's income in particular since this would generally make use of existing skills and technology.
Packaging is probably important in attracting consumers for local products when they must compete against imports. Producers need advice about moving dried and processed products from rural areas to larger outlets in towns. These activities could be implemented in some appropriate areas of the Project, especially those where fruit-tree plantations are widespread (Jordan, Quneitra, Homs).
