It is a well-known fact that women’s access to finance is a great challenge affecting their business growth and even socio-economic advancement. Despite these challenges, they continue to be instrumental in agric production, thereby providing livelihoods to their communities and the country at large.
It was reported in Tuesday’s edition of The Point that Finance Action Women (FAW) in partnership with Migration and Sustainable Development in The Gambia (MSDG) has convened training for 90 women on agricultural marketing for rural women. The participants are women from the West Coast, Lower River and Upper River Regions.
The training seeks to promote and create market linkages for women and build their capacities thus focusing on the agricultural value chain to increase and optimise their return on their respective agricultural activities through value addition and access to high end markets.
This training, therefore, is crucial in the sense that women continue to be pivotal in addressing many issues especially family life providing fish monies, paying of children’s school fees and medical costs, among others.
This opportunity availed to our rural women would significantly boost their standing and respective businesses, thereby connecting them to opportunities.
It is high time as a country, stakeholders see how to promote and create market linkages for women by building their capacities on the agricultural value chain to increase and optimise their returns.
One of the challenges that rural women faced is access to market and non-availability of soft loans to augment their agricultural endeavour.
We therefore commend FAW and their partnership for the foresight in convening such an important forum for rural women.
In sub-Saharan Africa, only 37 percent of women have a bank account, compared with 48 percent of men, a gap that has only widened over the past several years, according to experts.
This has made their condition even worse and to apply for soft loans. It is true that some women entrepreneurs have managed to be even more successful in small businesses than their male counterparts.
The continent’s gender gap in access to finance is having a great setback on the social and economic progress of nations.
Women today dominate African agriculture, the continent’s most important sector. When women farmers lack access to financial services, their ability to invest in modern technologies to raise their productivity is limited. They cannot diversify their farms and cannot grow high-value crops and invest in assets such as livestock.
Let’s support our women in the agric value chain to be able to make a difference in the country’s socio-economic development.