Women farmers in the Global South, particularly in India, face multiple barriers in accessing essential agricultural inputs, modern technologies, and training opportunities. These barriers are often compounded by the fact that women’s identity as farmers is overlooked. However, agricultural extension services can play a critical role in responding to the needs of women farmers, ensuring they gain access to the resources, knowledge, and support they require.
Our own experience has been that agricultural extension services, which provide farmers with training, support and information to improve agricultural practices, are typically designed with male farmers in mind. We also find that skills and information accessed by men are rarely diffused to other members of the family. This also holds true for technology and digital tools promoted in agriculture. It is due to low phone ownership rates amongst women and the fact that most platforms and resources are designed for users who have close, continuous, individual access and knowledge of technology .
Women-led collectives, such as cooperatives, self-help groups or food producer companies, have emerged as promising platforms to address some of these challenges. Collectives facilitate peer learning and knowledge sharing among women farmers. They improve access to training and extension services, and enhance their bargaining power. Thus, enabling them to access platforms that advocate for more inclusive policies that address their own specific needs. They also help women farmers to overcome barriers of limited access to credit by facilitating group loans or credit schemes, enabling women to invest in their agricultural enterprises.
10 Key Recommendations to make women farmers agricultural extension services gender responsive
What lessons do SEWA’s women-led agriculture cooperatives offer to make extension and advisory services more gender-responsive? Ratilaben, a farmer and board member of Megha Mandali—an indigenous women’s agriculture cooperative—and Jayaben Vaghela, a second-generation SEWA member and senior consultant at the SEWA Cooperative Federation, shared ten recommendations. They presented these insights at a workshop organized by IRRI and CGIAR at the National Institute of Agriculture Extension Management (MANAGE) in Hyderabad in November 2025 on women farmers agricultural extension services.
Partner with women-led collective structures and their federations
Cooperatives build their own frontline cadre with tremendous social capital, community trust, and last-mile reach. They provide platforms for women to organize and demand the services they need from extension providers. By partnering with these cooperatives or their Federations, extension service providers connect directly with women farmers. This partnership enables actors in extension systems to better understand women’s demands and skill sets, tailoring services to meet farmers’ needs effectively.
Create systems that acknowledge and build on women’s skills
This involves highlighting women’s specific contributions across the value chain, including processes like seed preservation and treatment, sowing, weeding, harvesting, and processing. Recognizing these contributions and strengthening women’s technical capacities in these areas serve as the first steps to enhancing their uptake of extension services.
Tailor services for women farmers
Train women farmers effectively by setting up training facilities within five to ten miles of villages, focusing on processing and other skills. Provide resources in the local language and create visual tools that women farmers can easily understand. Build a cadre of women agriculture extension workers by enhancing the capacities of existing frontline workers or grassroots leaders from cooperatives, NGO-promoted collectives, and State Rural Livelihoods Missions. Supplement the physical presence and support of agriculture extension workers with digital tools through investment in ‘phygital’ systems, ensuring the physical component remains primary.
Incentivise and promote entrepreneurship
Focus training on building technical skills for agricultural practices while aiming for market access and enhanced livelihoods for women. Design training programs to develop a business mindset among women farmers, enabling them to innovate. Provide incentives to foster a better risk appetite among women farmers. For instance, offer guaranteed paybacks to encourage the adoption of new seed varieties.
Facilitate and support market linkages
Offer end-to-end services to help women access markets, including working capital, digital literacy, business planning, and continuous handholding support. An example of how Kheda Women Farmer Cooperative leverages market linkages for mustard production can be found here.
Organise exposure visits and build role models
Design exposure visits to be women-centric, focusing on building skills and showcasing role models. Provide incentives to women farmers to establish farming demonstration and learning sites. Identify innovative women farmers and facilitate opportunities for exposure and cross-learning with other women farmers.
Co-design women-led innovations
Extension systems must co-design context-specific innovations with women farmers’ collectives to gradually increase their reach to women farmers. These innovations should address gaps in essential services while being community-managed, owned, and operated as enterprises to ensure long-term sustainability. For example, Megha Mandali set up several hyper-local ‘krishi suvidha kendras’ (KSKs) or farmer facilitation sites for women farmers. This was in response to member demands for affordable, quality agricultural inputs and equipment. These low-cost enterprises bypass middlemen in the agri-value chain, offer advisory services on proper input utilization, and facilitate linkages to schemes and entitlements.
Set up mechanisms for bottom-up policy action
Women farmers need specific platforms to voice their challenges and requirements, ensuring their demands and perspectives reach policymakers. These platforms play a crucial role in shaping gender-responsive policy initiatives.
Design marketing strategies to reach women farmers
Extension systems can adopt and learn from marketing strategies used by seed companies to promote their services more effectively among women farmers.
Agro-ecologically define vision and targets at the block level
Extension and advisory systems must design long-term, block-level strategies that consider the specific agro-ecological milieu. This will include the landscape, food patterns, existing farm and non-farm livelihoods, and climatic conditions of the region. These strategies strengthen women farmers’ adaptive capacities, enable better decision-making, and build resilience in their farming practices.
These recommendations on women farmers agricultural extension services were shared at a workshop organised by IRRI and CGIAR at the National Institute of Agriculture Extension Management (MANAGE), in Hyderabad in November, 2025.
*The Megha Mandali has over a 1000 members, across five blocks, in the Tapi district of Southern Gujarat.
