Gender Disparity in Agricultural Technology Adoption

Agro-pastoral women make significant contribution to subsistence agriculture and ensuring food security and the mainstay of the farm labour. They work in all aspects of agriculture. In addition to their active engagement in agriculture and livestock production women are responsible for all household chores, mainly as a result of the gender division of Labour. However, agricultural development programs and planning give inadequate attention to women farmers and their needs, and hence their farming activities take place on an ever shrinking resource base with extremely primitive technology and with severely stretched time resources. The model result revealed that adoption of improved sorghum package is biased by gender, where Female Headed Households adopt the package relatively less due to Socio-cultural, Economic, and Institutional factors. Therefore, equal access to resources and extension services, gender sensitive participatory technology development; efficient inputs delivery systems, and linkage to market are essential to accelerate agricultural development through technology adoption.