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This is particularly the case in Sub-Saharan Africa where women provide most of the labor and make the key decisions for many agricultural activities. This applies not only to food production, long recognized as primarily a -- women's activity, but also increasingly to other agricultural activities ranging from processing and marketing to cash cropping and animal husbandry.

# C sé, : **NAUIU** W **FILE** OF A **YWOAM** FARMER"

Sindima, _a_ farmer in Malawi, is in her late thirties. She tives with her five chitdren in an area with retatively good soits and dependable rainfalt. Her husband left to find work in the city and she sees him infrequently, so she heads the househoad, manages the farm, and does atmost att the work. She farms about 2-1/2 hectares and la able to feed her family and produce some crops to sell. sy local standards, Sindima is affluent. A development assistance program has been active in her village, so she belongs to a farmers' club and has access to the extension agent for information and credit for some fertiLizer and ipproved seeds. With this help, she plants a fairty complicated mix of crops: ptanting hybrid maize with applications of fertitizer on about one-half hectare. However, she continues to plant local maize aven though it ls Less productive because it testes better and is aess susceptible to insect damage in storage.

Sindimals fields require heavy Labor -- with preparetion, planting, weeding, and harvesting all timed to keep the land in production as long as the rains lest. She atso has household responsibilities: caring for the children, grinding maize, gathering firewood, and cooking. She even brews a tittle beer to sell et the market. ler children hetp -- the otder girls walk to the welI twice each day to get water and help search for f irewood -- but she can af ford ta pay their school fees so she encourages them to get an education.

Source: Office of Technology Assessment, 1988.

1.08 Data on the role of women in agriculture in Africa is fragmented, but the International Labor Organizetionl estimateu that in Africa 78% of females are economically active in agriculture compared to only 64% of males (Buvinic and Lycette 1988). In Zambia, a random sample of farm households in three provinces indicated that during the farming season women contributed 53% of total hours of labor in agriculture to men's 47% (Due and Mudenda 1984 as cited in Safilios-Rothschild 1985). Studies on Malawi have reported that 50 to 70% of all agricultural work was done by women and 69% of farmers were female (Kydd and Christiansen 1982; Clark 1975, cited in Evans, 1989). In Guinea, women in most regions perform 40 to 50% of agricultural work (Herzog 1988), and an estimated 60% of Gambian women are farmers (World Bank 1988). In Burkina Faso women are responsible for 49% of the labor in crop production. (Tinker 1981 cited in von Braun and Webb 1987)

1.09 Official Undearestimate of Female Agricultural Labor. Standard data sources have been criticized for underestimating female workers especially those who are unpaid, and for undervaluing the worth of femaleproduced goods and services (Dixon-Mueller 1985). In Malawi, for example, official figures showed that only 12% of women were economically active in agriculture in 1972; in 1977 this was revised to 52% (Ewusi 1980 cited in Jiggins, 1986). The fact that women'3 involvement in agriculture is typically much greater than official figures suggest has enormous implications for the type and extent of the agricultural support services they require.

1.10 Female Heads of Households. A growing phenomenon across Africa is the female-headed household. Definitions of what constitutes a female-headed