Challenges to venture implementation and adaptation in the African context include mitigating gender perspectives and exercising gender integration. As women start to emigrate away from traditional household roles, their positions in the economy and an understanding of their income generating activities must be evaluated. A study done by the International Lax and Policy Institute concluded that while most innovators understand the need for gender integration, they fail to include gender considerations in their initial business plans. Aside from the innovators, there are traditional unequal power dimensions that shape women’s empowerment or “empowerment pathways”. These dimensions include; agency- the ability to make one’s own choices, relations-our ability to create, participate in and benefit from networks, and structure- organizational forms and invisible norms. Gender sensitive innovations and attempting to diminish these gender dimensions can contribute to a wider adoption of innovations and greater business success. Integration, targeting, and dialogue are three important approaches in building innovations or ventures that successfully empower women and increase communities awareness of gender challenges.
Integration starts with developing tools that allow for gender disparities to be acknowledged, avoided, and eliminated. One tool, creating a activity profile, assists in listing who in each community is in control of activities. Innovators need to understand which parties are in control of what actives and how the can either work around or negotiate a change of hands. Also, understanding who has access and control will aid in creating pathways for women to gain passage to key resources. By acknowledging these gender dynamics, innovators can then work to create strategies and plans for reducing gender imbalances.While making these strategies innovators must asks themselves what change they would like to see, how can that change can be measured, and what specific barriers they are attempting to mollify. Innovators can then create both qualitative and quantitative indicators to measure their success, collect opinions of women they have empowered and share their stories with other organizations attempting to do the same thing.
Developing special interventions and activities that target specific groups or issues can assist innovators in tackling one specific issues and including women in the business plan. Such interventions can include; enabling women to take part in various planning stages, including woman in discussion groups, collecting their opinions, marketing to women specifically and integrating gender policies into venture guidelines. By following these or other intervention strategies, innovators will break down barriers of women integration within the business and empower women to shape and voice their opinions.
To begin implementing gender sensitive innovations, we must “emphasize that both men and women are in a position to benefit from greater gender equality, and that communities are strong and more resilient when everyone’s skills and talents are used to promote sustainable development”. This means dialogues and discussion groups not only with new innovators but also with customers and community figureheads.
Gro Greenhouses encompasses gender integration within the venture and challenges gender perspectives within the community. The greenhouses in itself is a gender sensitive innovation. It takes into consideration the roles of women within the household (women are usually in control of the agronomic needs) and how those roles could be made better (utilizing a greenhouse) Gro Greenhouses has three customer segments, one specifically being women’s cooperatives and many of our agro-entrepreneurs are women. We also take into consideration that many of our customers whether woman or not come to us without prior knowledge of farming techniques. We offer a decision support tool that guides new farmers in proper farming techniques. We have also taken into consideration how to handle problems that arise within these cooperatives. For example, in Mozambique we had some leadership and agronomic issues with one of the women cooperatives. To solve this problem we connected this group with an experienced group of farmers who were able to personally work with them and improve their farming techniques.
“From the point of view of the innovator, it is important to understand the rural livelihoods and the potential adopters of the new technology.” To ensure that the innovation is adequately adopted and addresses a need, the innovators must understand how men and women divide tasks within the household and community. No only does incorporating gender sensitive policies empower women and leads to greater gender understanding, it will assist in a wider adoption of innovations and greater business success for the innovator.
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