🌍 🇿🇦 Rural women small-scale farmers keep households and local markets going, yet many structural barriers limit their participation and growth. Insecure land rights and gender-blind institutions that treat everyone the same on paper but overlook women’s circumstances end up excluding them from the agriculture industry.
In many communal areas, women lack title deeds or joint ownership, so they can’t pledge land as collateral. Because of this, banks often assess women smallholders as “high risk”, and formal credit remains out of reach. Cooperative boards and agriculture programme committees are largely run by men.
