By: Shoba Suri and Sharon Sarah Thawaney
Across much of the Global South, agriculture has become increasingly woman-intensive. Women make up 36 per cent of the global agricultural workforce, with participation exceeding 50 per cent in large parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The UN’s theme for International Women’s Day 2026, “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls,” highlights the need to translate recognition into agency, a call reinforced by the designation of 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer. Despite driving the bulk of production, women occupy the segments of the value chain with the least control, limiting their ability to influence markets, investment and sectoral priorities.
Where Women Stand in the Value Chain
Women remain concentrated in the lower segments of these chains, which are labour-intensive and generate low returns. The feminisation of agriculture, driven in part by male out-migration and structural transformation, has expanded women’s responsibilities in smallholder farming. These smallholders account for the majority of the world’s farmers and produce roughly half of global food.
Their role is similarly pronounced in post-harvest handling, processing and storage, where they perform nearly half of such labour in low- and middle-income countries. However, these activities are frequently informal, characterised by low capital intensity and limited integration with formal markets. In Nigeria’s Delta State, for instance, women undertake up to 90 per cent of cassava processing but exercise little control over productive assets or marketing channels.
The pattern is illustrative of a broader structural gradient in the Global South, where value addition and margins increase along the chain, and female representation declines. Evidence from India reflects that only 13 per cent of women farmers report selling through formal APMC mandis. Even in larger agri and allied enterprises, women constitute between 6 and 10 per cent of employees, with even lower representation in ownership and managerial roles. Because higher-value nodes determine pricing, standards and investment flows, women’s limited presence there restricts both their share of income and their influence over market governance.
Structural Barriers and the Cost of Exclusion
This distributional pattern is rooted in structural constraints, foremost among them unequal land ownership. Although women comprise roughly half the agricultural workforce in many developing regions, only about 15 per cent globally own land. Given that land functions as collateral, as a basis for eligibility under state schemes, and further limited ownership narrows access to finance, insurance and commercial networks, thereby reinforcing concentration in low-return activities.
Time poverty compounds these barriers, as women spend on average 2.5 times more hours than men on unpaid care work, restricting mobility and limiting their ability to engage in higher-value work. Financial exclusion further inhibits upward movement within value chains. A large majority of women-led enterprises report unmet credit demand, while microfinance products remain too small and short-tenured to enable mechanisation and innovation. The digital divide intensifies these disadvantages; disparities in access to agricultural information and digital platforms translate into weaker bargaining power and reduced responsiveness to market signals.
Climate stress interacts with each of these constraints. For instance, the FAO finds that female-headed agricultural households experience disproportionate income losses from heat and extreme weather events, partly because of limited access to assets and insurance. At the same time, women are also custodians of indigenous knowledge systems and agro-ecological practices that have sustained over generations. However, much of this knowledge is not recognised and mainstreamed into broader policy-making.
These exclusions translate to weaker agrifood systems and carry high costs. The FAO estimates that closing gender gaps in access to productive resources could increase women’s farm yields by 20 to 30 per cent, raise agricultural output in developing countries by up to 4 per cent, and reduce hunger significantly. These projected gains underscore that gender inequality in agriculture represents not merely a social concern but an indicator of macroeconomic inefficiency arising from the systematic underutilisation of labour, land and capital. When women lack secure assets and decision-making authority, investment incentives weaken, productivity growth slows, and intergenerational returns suffer.
Moving Women Up the Chain
Policy responses must therefore address the institutional architecture that positions women at the base of the value chain. Secure land rights remain foundational, as they enhance bargaining power and unlock access to formal finance and public programmes. However, titling initiatives must be linked to functional credit channels, including dedicated lending windows, risk guarantees and climate adaptation funds designed to reach women’s collectives at scale. Expanding digital infrastructure and literacy is equally critical in enabling women’s full participation.
Climate policy must also integrate women’s agro-ecological knowledge into formal planning and ensure their representation in decision-making platforms. Finally, recognising women as farmers in land registries, subsidy databases and climate finance reporting would reduce institutional invisibility and enable more accurate policy targeting.
Women, therefore, remain foundational in building resilience across the agri-value chain. Repositioning women within higher-value nodes of agrifood systems is therefore not a matter of symbolic recognition but of institutional reform aimed at improving productivity, equity and building climate resilience.
Shoba Suri is a Senior Fellow, Health Initiative at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
Sharon Sarah Thawaney is an Executive Assistant to the Vice President (Development Studies) and ORF Kolkata.
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