Gender Relations
in Lizhi Township(click to download .pdf)
The Women's Rural Education Network (WREN) was a Canadian College Partnership Project of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and designed to improve the management skills of rural women in Sichuan Province of the People's Republic of China. As one component of this project, training was provided to several hundred women in five villages in the Yi Minority Autonomous Prefecture in Lizhi Township.
Until recently, the Yi people have lived in harsh, subsistence conditions, less than 50 years removed from a feudal society that practiced slavery. Enhanced management skills will allow the Yi women of Lizhi Township to engage more fully and more profitably in their family agricultural enterprises. The main goal of the project was to transfer to these women the skills required to maximize crop yields, increase income-generation, and improve community lifestyle.
While more could still be done to improve the status and power of women in Lizhi Township, the project achieved the intended result by helping women to increase their income-generation capabilities and their influence in the community. But they are only one of three beneficiaries of this project.
The purpose of the partnership between the Canadian Colleges, Algonquin and Northern, and the China Enterprise Management Training Centre at Chengdu was to transfer to CMTCC the leadership and training skills that would increase the competence of rural women in managing their small businesses.
CMTCC staff enthusiastically adapted the concept and tools of participatory appraisal and gender relations analysis introduced to them in March 1998. They gained experience in many of the data collection and analytical techniques, including baseline studies, surveys, interviews, and walking tours. Throughout the project, there was a continuous interplay between gender relations analysis and training action, each influencing and validating the other branch of the project activity. Initially, CMTCC staff relied on advice, models and techniques imported from abroad but in recent years, initiative and autonomy have been readily assumed by CMTCC.
From the beginning of the project, members of the Women-in-Development committee of CMTCC were involved in project discussions and played an important role in establishing connections between project staff and the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) representatives in Xide County and Lizhi Township.
In addition to introducing CMTCC staff and Canadian members of the contingent to the community, the ACWF representatives also contracted for much of the training provided to Lizhi women and assisted where possible in data collection. In one of the most significant project activities, 57 county leaders of the Sichuan Women's Federation were led through a participatory appraisal workshop in October 2000. The facilitated session helped to identify changes that these women leaders expect to occur in the next 5 to 10 years and gave them an opportunity to position themselves to become leaders in and not victims of the development process.
Most of the women who participated in the WREN project reported a direct relationship between the applied technology and skills training they received and an observable improvement in their family income. Through discussions, interviews and analysis of survey results, it also became clear that some women felt that they have also gained a stronger "voice", or influence in their family and in their community.
The participants themselves increased the impact of the training by sharing their new learning and experiences with others in their villages. Assuming the role of teachers has made these information/message carriers more active and influential in their neighborhood or community in ways they themselves may not be aware.
In conjunction with the training activities, the project team employed the methodologies of participatory rural appraisal and gender relations analysis to identify appropriate gender-sensitive indicators as a means to modify training programs and measure their results.
PRA has been defined as "a growing family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan, to act, to monitor and evaluate."
Their successful implementation in this project suggests that these methodologies can be selected and scaled to fit the resources available while still yielding highly useful information for project design, implementation and evaluation.
Women play a critical role in the agriculture of the developing world. Estimates suggest that women are responsible for 65% of household food production in Asia. Typically, because of their domestic and child-rearing responsibilities, women concentrate their agricultural activities in a fairly limited area around the homestead. Now, as men move into off-farm employment, women are assuming even more responsibility for agriculture, adding managerial and decision-making tasks to their workload.
This common pattern is evident in Lizhi Township in the Sichuan Province of the People's Republic of China where, in addition to devoting a substantial portion of their working time to food production, women also carry the primary responsibility for the security of household food, for household cleaning and maintenance, and for increasing household finances through a variety of income-generating activities. Because of these multiple responsibilities, when compared to men in the same household working in agriculture, women tend to have:
Men and women use different farming systems, work in different agriculture domains (e.g., crops versus livestock), have different levels of access to resources, and may achieve different status as a result of their efforts. As a result, women's productivity remains low relative to their potential.