The last is certainly not the least so goes the saying as the  finale episode of Aggie Ps Talk Season 7 aired last October 19 unleashed two of the best stories of passionate women in the field of social entrepreneurship. These empowered women gave meaning and brought inspiration to all women on their role as social entrepreneurs. They are living proof that women have the ability  to implement strategies that would help solve the problems of a community or a society. They were Dr. Liza Marie Dacanay and Dr. Catherine Sobrevega.

Empowering Women in Agricultural  Value Chains (AVCs) through Social Entrepreneurship

The first speaker of the episode was Dr. Liza Dacanay, the founding president of the Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia (ISEA).

Leveling off with her presentation, Dr. Dacanay explained social entrepreneurship is a field study  that entails innovations designed to explicitly improve societal well-being housed within entrepreneurial organizations, which initiate, guide or contribute to change in society.

Dr. Dacanay shared that ISEA has partners in the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia where they did an action research of best practices among social enterprises and inclusive businesses in agriculture value chains (AVCs). Based on the insights from the best practices, they have put together the most important results in a set of benchmarks for transformational partnership and women economic empowerment in AVCs. The benchmarking research has validated that the success of empowerment strategies have to do with control over resources, power of decisions and the capability to manage resources and decision-making effectively and sustainably. Dr. Dacanay also provided some insights from the benchmarking research. These are as follows:

1. Women small producers are playing various roles in agriculture and agriculture value chains but are usually not recognized, unpaid or underpaid.
2. When women are engaged, their participation is constrained by systemic barriers including their responsibility for unpaid care work which is not given attention.
3. Non-engagement of women usually results to loss of opportunities and opportunity costs

Dr. Dacanay also provided the following factors of success for Agriculture Value Chain interventions in empowering women:

1. They need to provide appropriate technology and community-based oriented innovations
2. They need to provide a more substantive share of value created overtime
3. Food Security and Resilience
4. Empowerment of small producers
5. Stewardship and sustainability
6. Transactional and transformational services
7. Women’s participation and employment
8. That there are measurable outcomes of transformation in the AVC intervention.

Concluding her presentation, Dr. Dacanay  summarized that social entrepreneurship actually provides innovative pathways to sustainability and empowerment of women in AVCs.

MEDA or Menonite Economic Development Associate

Sharing her experience as an international development professional for over 30 years of NGO work was Dr. Catherine Sobrevega, currently the country manager of MEDA.

Dr. Sobrevega explained that MEDA is an international NGO that focuses on economic development which includes agriculture, market systems and investments that would provide additional or increase livelihood to the people they wanted to help. MEDA’s strategy is to do market assessment or they look at the whole system when they select a country they want to help.  MEDA works in 70 countries around the world for 70 years now.

Dr. Sobrevega  believes that women empowerment starts from knowing. She added that if women are informed, they can earn a livelihood. In so doing, she emphasized the need to start from the following basic values: 1) collaborations with stakeholders, 2) accountability, 3) respect, and 4) entrepreneurship.

Sharing her work experience in improving market opportunities for women in Myanmar which was replication from Afghanistan are some lessons learned. First, engaging women in trainings resulted in the sharing of the learnings to the members of the family. Second, women learned to connect with traders for their produce to be picked-up from the village. Third, women learned to go into value adding because of the trainings they have attended. Fourth, women were provided training on business and marketing, hence some of them became sales agents.

Ending her presentation, she emphasized that having women in the value chain should start at the beginning even at the conceptual planning of the project  to be more inclusive and to have more women to participate in the value chain.

Watch the video through this link: youtube.com/watch?v=9Z_PouFvQNk&t=4532s

(IMGesmundo)