Relevance of Womens' Caucus in Biodiversity Propagation

 By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

Rome 25.02.2025

The CBD Women's Caucus emphasises the urgent need for a human rights-based, gender-responsive approach to biodiversity finance, advocating for robust environmental and social safeguards to be enforced as a means to avoid negative impacts from harmful financing schemes.

There are manifold avenues to make women stakeholders in mitigating biodiversity loss. There are successful examples to be followed too. In this Podcast you will understand how a Women’s Collective under the guidance of Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre or AFEC in Anantapur in the southern Indian State of Andhra Pradesh have come together to grow millets as an agro ecological intervention (in an effort to combat desertification) to produce millets and sell its products like cakes, confectionary, health foods, soup mixes, healthy snacks etc. sell them and earn a decent side income to supplement their farmer husbands’ agricultural income.

Marginalised Women farmers are supported to take up niche farming like millets, crop seeds native nuts etc… so that it meets their fiscal, nutrition and livelihood needs.

 

This woman farmer has succeeded in securing her livelihood with exclusive peanut farming thanks to micro-finance credit from Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre. Photo credit: Mohammed Valli, AFEC.

Another NGO involved in Watershed Management to combat desertification in the same Anantapur district has employed women to water the saplings in the watersheds. Apart from gardening / watering the saplings, rural illiterate women are deployed to create mud pots… which are placed in the subterranean beds of the young saplings for pot drip irrigation. These pots made by women potters are placed by women gardeners in the saplings’ beds, and the pots have a single pin hole at the bottom. The women gardeners tie a band to the mouth of the pots which are fastened to the bottom pinhole. The women gardeners fill up the five Litre pots twice a day. The band ensures that the water trickles drop by drop to the roots of the young saplings and for the whole water to drain out it takes about five to six hours.  That ensures that the saplings are watered almost for 10 – 12 hours a day.

Women are also engaged extensively to tend to the saplings with drip irrigation, for which they are involved in sourcing recyclables to streamlining drip irrigation infrastructure. Watering the saplings in harsh weathered Anantapur which is located at the crossroads of Southwest and Northeast monsoons in the Indian Subcontinent falls on the frail shoulders of the illiterate and fiscally very vulnerable rural malnourished women of the desertified district. The extremely malnourished and impoverished rural women who did not have access to clean water and sanitation, nor food security today are in a far better position with NGOs that have employed them, giving them food security, and livelihood security. NGOs involved in rural watershed management have succeeded in increasing the ground water table from - 60 metres below the ground to – 4 metres below the ground. 


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