Women farmers plant organic to escape poverty



“It’s a profitable business! », Rejoices Agathe Vanié, farmer by profession: like her, thousands of women in rural Ivory Coast have turned to organic food crops, to acquire a financial autonomy rare in their environment, reports theAFP.

Sitting in her shop, Agathe Vanié, proudly presents the products that occupy the stalls of Divo’s first organic stall in west-central Côte d’Ivoire. The boxes of eggplant, peanuts, pepper, peppers, turmeric, okra etc … stamped organic which attract many customers, come from the fields of 2,000 rural women of Divo grouped within Walo, an association to fight against poverty.

“Guarantee their health”

“We need to educate women so that they no longer treat the soil,” adds Agathe Vanié. The president of Walo (“love” in the Dida language, the local ethnicity) hopes to enable women farmers to acquire financial autonomy while cultivating healthy products.

“I brought the women together to get into organic farming, first to guarantee their health, to be independent and to be able to send their children to school and get out of poverty,” he explains. -she to theAFP. Formerly cocoa producers, the members of the association were convinced by her speech. “We will be able to earn money by launching ourselves into a crop other than cocoa, by cultivating food crops without the addition of chemical fertilizers”.

Women “suffer […] strong inequalities ”

This kind of initiative is making a breakthrough in rural Côte d’Ivoire where the poverty rate in the agricultural sector is around 60% according to official statistics. Orange Bank Africa and UN Women signed a partnership agreement on July 1 in Abidjan “with a view to jointly addressing the challenges of access to finance and marketing, which women in rural areas face”.

Women in Côte d’Ivoire “still suffer today from strong inequalities and encounter many structural problems in their entrepreneurial and agricultural activities”, points out Orange Bank Africa, citing in particular “the difficulty of access to credit”.

The bank has thus promised easy access to 100% digital credit and savings solutions for these populations. Building on the first commercial successes of its products which “cross borders”, the Walo association has announced a project to build its health center and a processing plant.



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