Female empowerment in family agriculture in the state of Bahia, Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Bruno, Nelma Lima
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Profice, Christiana Cabicieri, Aguiar, Paulo César Bahia de, Pires, Mônica de Moura, Ferraz, Marcelo Inácio Ferreira
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Research, Society and Development
• Texto Completo: https://rsdjournal.org/index.php/rsd/article/view/32003
• topic: Comunidade; Equidade de Gênero; Desenvolvimento rural.; Comunidad; Equidad de género; Desarrollo rural.; Community; Gender Equity; Rural development.

The main objective of this article is to analyze female empowerment in family farming in the Nova Vida and Limoeiro Rural Settlement Projects, state of Bahia, Brazil. As a guiding method for the research, the tool to measure the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) was adapted from a perspective of application and gender analysis in rural agrarian reform settlements. In this study, we used the answers given especially by women about the members of their families, and about their realities in relation to the community, from a semi-structured form, which in Nova Vida was applied in the year 2020, and in the Lemon tree in the year 2021, both in person. The semi-structured form contained indicators in five domains of female empowerment: production, resources, income, leadership and time. The scale adopted was from 0 to 4, with five levels of empowerment, from the worst situation to the most satisfactory. The sub-indices and the overall empowerment index correspond to the simple weighted average of the scores obtained. The results indicated that in the community of the Nova Vida settlement, in general, women were in a situation of low-medium empowerment in agriculture, and in the community of the Limoeiro settlement this situation was of medium empowerment. In both settlements, the indicators “decisions on planning and management of the plot” and “time” of the daily routine, showed that the female gender had little participation in decisions related to production and that they had an overload in hours, adding domestic and agricultural activities. This may be contributing to a lesser empowerment of this genre, something that could be mitigated with a greater distribution of these household chores with partners and children.