For more than a century, International Women’s Day has served as a rallying point for gender equality. Yet, 115 years after the first observance in 1911, many women (especially those working in the agricultural supply chain) still face deep-rooted social and economic barriers. This year’s United Nations theme, “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls”, underscores the need to move from commitments toward structural change. For development organisations like Solidaridad, the message is clear: gender justice cannot be achieved through policy declarations alone. It requires deliberate action to dismantle the social and economic barriers that continue to shape women’s opportunities.
Across West Africa, women form a significant share of the agricultural labour force and play a central role in food production. Yet, many continue to farm without secure land rights, access to credit or control over the income their labour generates. At the same time, deeply entrenched social norms place the burden of unpaid care work disproportionately on women, creating severe time poverty that limits their ability to participate fully in markets, leadership and decision-making.
Addressing these barriers is critical to advancing several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5 (Gender Equality), SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). But progress toward these goals requires more than policy alignment. It requires practical solutions that address inequality across the entire agricultural system, from households and farms to markets and governance structures.
At Solidaridad West Africa, this systemic approach guides programmes to translate the International Women’s Day call for rights, justice and action into measurable change. Rather than addressing gender inequality through isolated interventions, Solidaridad works across several agricultural commodity supply chains to ensure that women’s rights translate into real economic power.
“Transforming agricultural supply chains means addressing the root barriers that limit women’s participation, from access to productive resources to time poverty. When those barriers are removed, gender equality becomes a driver of productivity, sustainability and fairness.”
Priscilla Animah Obirikorang, SWA’s Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) Lead and Coordinator, Acting Now and Pathways to Prosperity programmes
Where Inequality Begins
In many rural communities, the barriers women face in agriculture first emerge within the household. Participation in markets, farmer organisations or leadership roles often depends on decisions made at home. When women lack influence over financial decisions or remain responsible for the majority of domestic labour, their ability to expand their farms or businesses remains constrained.
Recognising this, Solidaridad addresses household power dynamics through gender-transformative approaches such as the Gender Model Family (GMF) and Gender Action Learning System (GALS) methodologies. These approaches, combined with community and spousal dialogues, support farming households to reconsider how responsibilities and resources are shared.
Across West Africa, more than 11,000 farmers and their spouses under the Acting Now and Pathways to Prosperity programmes have participated in these approaches, strengthening joint decision-making around farm investments, household income and labour distribution. In Ghana alone, 4,851 crop producers, including 1,583 adult women and 364 young women, participated in Gender Model Family activities in 2025 to improve women’s control over income and their role in household decision-making.
For farmers like Fatmata Kamara in Sierra Leone, the change has been immediate. Before participating in the Gender Model Family activities, her husband made all of the financial and farm decisions. Today, those decisions are shared, reducing household conflict while enabling the family to invest more strategically in nutrition and agricultural inputs.
From Household Change to Agricultural Productivity
When women gain greater influence over household decisions, the impact often extends directly to agricultural productivity. In Nigeria, improved farming practices among participating women farmers have led to yield increases of 135% for maize, 70% for vegetables and 151% for potatoes, compared with baseline levels.
Yet even as productivity improves, many women farmers encounter another structural barrier that limits their ability to scale their enterprises: access to financial services and agricultural support systems.
Unlocking Access to Finance and Services
In many rural communities, access to quality inputs continues to be a challenge due to limited availability and financial barriers. Agricultural credit still depends on land titles, assets that women are often prevented from owning under customary systems. Without collateral, financial institutions remain out of reach.
Solidaridad introduced the Farmers’ Input Delivery and Investment Scheme, a revolving financing model that allows farmers to access high-quality inputs on credit and repay the cost after harvest in Nigeria.
So far, the programme has supported more than 17,000 farmers in obtaining the seeds and inputs needed to increase production. For many women, this access translates directly into economic independence. For example, in Kaduna State, 1,010 women and female youth received seeds and training to establish backyard gardens.
One participant, Sa’adatu Adamu, a stay-at-home wife, now earns 15,000 naira (9 euros) monthly from vegetable sales, generating income she previously had no independent access to. To sustain these gains, the project also trained 12,455 women and female youth in value addition, enabling them to process perishable crops into higher-value products such as tomato paste and potato flour.
In Ghana, Solidaridad is also reimagining access to agricultural service delivery, both for and by women. Farm management services such as pruning and spraying have historically been male-dominated. To change this narrative, the Pathways to Prosperity Cocoa project in 2025 trained 200 cooperative members, 110 of them women, as professional service providers. These women have been organised into 15 service groups, and equipped with motorised sprayers, cutlasses and personal protective equipment necessary to run agricultural service businesses.
Through business-to-business networking, 2,048 farmers have been connected to these service providers. To ensure women farmers could afford these services, Solidaridad facilitated financing arrangements with cocoa buyers. Some Licensed Buying Companies now subsidise services by paying a premium of 0.77 euros per bag of cocoa, helping ensure that women farmers can access essential farm management support.
Additionally, under the Acting Now programme in Ghana, 79 business-to-business sessions also connected over 1,000 women producers directly to accredited service providers offering agricultural inputs and mechanisation support.
Strengthening Collective Power and Leadership
Beyond individual entrepreneurship, Solidaridad’s programmes are strengthening women’s collective economic power. Through the Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) in Côte d’Ivoire, women have pooled their resources to lease farmland, establish collective cassava production and invest in shared transport solutions that reduce reliance on exploitative middlemen.
As women gain economic stability and safer working conditions, many begin stepping into leadership roles that influence broader agricultural systems. In Sierra Leone, Isatu Sesay exemplifies this transformation. Once a subsistence farmer, she now serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Evergreen Women’s Network and as a District Coordinator for the National Federation of Farmers, connecting grassroots producers with national agricultural policy platforms.
Her journey illustrates what becomes possible when women are supported not only to participate in agriculture but to shape the systems that govern it.
In Nigeria’s oil palm sector, deliberate engagement of 4,000 processors and workers in collective discussions using the Gender Action Learning System approach has dismantled historical power imbalances. This has resulted in a 5% increase in women holding managerial and supervisory roles in mills, positions previously dominated by men.
These experiences across Solidaridad West Africa’s programmes highlight an important lesson for global development efforts. Achieving SDG 5: Gender Equality requires more than commitments. It demands systemic change that addresses inequality at every level of the agricultural economy.
On this day, as we mark International Women’s Day, Solidaridad reaffirms its commitment to promoting an agricultural system where women are not only producers but decision-makers who are able to control income, access resources and influence the policies that shape rural economies.