Multifunctional platforms increase quality of lives of rural women
A recently released study on the impact of multifunctional platforms onto the lives of women has found them to significantly improve the lives of rural women. The machine that crushes, grinds and shreds, saws, drills and welds, pumps water and generates power, runs on nuts is a mill improving the lot of hundreds of women in Mali and Burkina Faso.
The "multipurpose platform of equipment and machinery" was developed in association with the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the UN Industrial Development Organization. The $6,000 machine's main application is food processing: it crushes peanuts and the seeds of the shea tree, it hulls rice, maize and sorghum, and it generates enough electricity to light an entire village. An electric water pump is easily attached.
The engine was originally designed to run on diesel fuel, but has since been modified to allow oil from indigenous Jatropha Curcas nuts to be used as a fuel.
The study assessed the impact of the multipurpose platform on the lives of women and found the following:
- The cumulated time saved in a week by a woman for cereal processing (millet, sorghum and maize) is equivalent to an eight-hour workday.
- The husking of 28 kilos of paddy is done in little less than one hour (56 minutes) instead of 48 hours by hand. This has resulted in an annual average production increase from 250-300 to 600 kilos of paddy per woman, and the generation of a new money income of 50,000 CFA per season.
- As for shea butter, the amount of time saved, thanks to mechanical grinding is of about four hours. Moreover, the amount of butter has increased of one kilo for each 10 kilos ground. This increase is also illustrated by a jump of women's annual income from 23,800 to 70,875 CFA.
- Time saving has enabled women, based on their situation, to increase the surface of cultivated land and consequently their production, with a special emphasis on more profitable products in terms of marketing (export products), such as rice and cotton, and to improve the yield of individual peanut fields, due to better weeding.
- Small businesses developed: buying and reselling of agricultural products, handicrafts, fish by-products, and the processing and sale of various condiments.
- A relatively important amount of money is redistributed to women who operate platforms in the form of weekly wages, based on the volume of activities, the type and number of modules installed, the number of clients and the condition of the engine and its equipment. This money is poured into village credit funds and allows women the access to micro funding.
- The improvement of girls school performance since the installation of platforms is characterized by the drop of girls lateness, as they are no longer burdened by the morning tasks of grain pounding and water fetching before going to school; their presence at school is also more regular as their mothers do not keep them home all day long to help with household duties at the occurrence of family celebrations. In addition, the increase of women's income since the installation of the platform (especially in Bougouni-Sikasso areas) has enabled them to invest part of this income in the education of their children (supply of school materials).
- The combination of the three factors (financial, technical, and the approach of targeting women in the project for the acquisition and the management of platforms) has a direct consequence of ''introducing women in the circle of official decision-makers'' at the village level, which would be otherwise impossible without their official integration in decision-making bodies and mechanisms existing within their respective communities.
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