In this blog, Ranjitha Puskur highlights why revamping the design of agricultural extension services—by recognising women as key clients—is critical for ensuring their relevance and effectiveness.
CONTEXT
Walk into any rural extension meeting in India and you’ll often see the same scene: rows of men gathered around an officer or input dealer, while women stand at the fringes, listening quietly or absent altogether. The assumption is clear — men are the “farmers,” women are “helpers.” But this picture is deeply misleading. Women form 42% of India’s agricultural workforce, yet they remain peripheral in agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS).
This invisibility is not an accident. It is the tip of the iceberg — beneath lies a structure of exclusion, outdated norms, and blind spots in policy and practice. Unless extension services are reimagined not just to reach, but benefit, empower, and transform women, feminisation of agriculture will remain a story of hidden labour and lost opportunity.
USING THE RBET FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS THE STATE OF EXTENSION
Terms like empowerment and transformation are profound, but in agricultural research and development, they often get diluted into buzzwords.
They are among the most frequently used and abused words in current times. I find the Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform (RBET) Framework useful to highlight what ails or holds back gender-responsive EAS and opportunities to correct it (Fig. 1). While we claim to empower women with every small and big activity, evidence shows we might not even be reaching or benefiting them effectively. Using ‘empowerment’ loosely inflates outcomes. Calling participation “empowerment” lets research and development actors, policymakers and donors tick boxes without addressing deeper inequities. The key question here is whether extension services have the intentionality to address deeper inequities that often restrict their interventions aimed at promoting the adoption of new knowledge and enhancing farmer incomes.
Why Don’t Extension Services Reach Women?
The barriers are well known, yet stubbornly persistent:
• Women don’t “qualify” as farmers in the eyes of the system. Women rarely appear in official statistics because fewer than 14% hold land titles. Land titles are overwhelmingly in men’s names, and many extension programs still target the “head of household” or landowner, automatically excluding women.
• Assumptions about households — that information given to one member (usually male) will automatically reach the other — are simply wrong. Studies show knowledge rarely flows seamlessly across gender within households.
• Time and mobility constraints mean women can’t always attend day-long trainings or travel to demonstration plots. Care burdens and social restrictions compound this.
• Male-dominated extension cadres discourage women’s participation. Without women extension agents, trust and comfort are limited.
These aren’t minor glitches. They are systemic flaws that keep women on the margins of knowledge systems.
Why Don’t Extension Services Benefit Women?
If extension professionals measure success only by participation counts, they miss the deeper question: who actually benefits? Even when women do participate, benefits often fall short. Why? Too often, extension delivers knowledge without dismantling structural barriers. A woman may learn a new practice but cannot adopt it because she lacks access to land, credit, or inputs. Without attention to intra-household dynamics, programs may inadvertently increase women’s labour without increasing their control.
• Technologies are designed without gender in mind. Mechanisation often fits men’s roles (ploughing, harvesting) rather than women’s tasks (weeding, transplanting).
• Literacy and education gaps make written communication ineffective, yet visual and hands-on methods remain underused.
• Digital divides mean mobile-based services reach men faster than women, who often lack phone ownership or control.
• Care burdens mean women simply cannot invest equal time in training or adoption of new practices.
Extension remains crop- and productivity-centred, not human-centred. Programs rarely begin with a gender analysis of who does what, who controls what, and who benefits.
Why Don’t Extension Services Empower Women?
Reaching and benefiting women is not enough. The ultimate test is empowerment. Merely counting women’s attendance in a training, meeting, or project is not empowerment. It says nothing about whether they gained control over resources, decisions, or outcomes.
Development projects often use empowerment to mean confidence-building, participation, or exposure. These are valuable, but without changes in access to land, credit, markets, and voice in decision-making, they don’t alter women’s position in power hierarchies. “Empowerment-lite” risks overclaiming impact and masking the persistence of structural inequality.
Real empowerment means shifts in power relations — within households, communities, or institutions. Did women gain a stronger voice in farm decisions? Did they control income from production? Did they influence local governance? These are more meaningful indicators. Here too, extension often fails.
• Advisory services are rarely bundled with structural reforms — like access to credit, land rights, or labour-saving tools — that are needed to unlock empowerment.
• Social norms that restrict women’s voices remain unchallenged. A woman may learn a new technology, but still need her husband’s approval to implement it.
• Programs rarely address intra-household power dynamics or engage men in conversations about gender equality.
Transformation is not about adding women into existing systems; it’s about changing the structures, norms, and institutions that exclude them. For instance, a woman learning a new skill but still needing her husband’s permission to apply it is not a transformation. Transformation would mean norms shift, so her knowledge and choices are respected in practice.
Extension cannot be gender-blind in unequal contexts. If it is, it risks reinforcing inequality rather than reducing it.
WHAT WORKS: LESSONS FROM EVIDENCE
The good news is that solutions exist. A systematic review of extension programs shows several strategies that consistently work for women:
1. Hands-on, visual methods — demonstrations, videos, farmer-to-farmer exchanges — help women overcome literacy barriers and retain knowledge.
2. Collective platforms — Self-Help Groups, women’s cooperatives, community forums — not only deliver knowledge but also build confidence and bargaining power.
3. Targeted and gender-sensitive design leads to higher adoption, incomes, and decision-making power. For example, training both men and women together, but creating safe spaces for women to discuss issues separately, reduces domestic conflict and increases mutual respect.
4. Cultural sensitivity with a transformative edge. The best programs respect local norms but also slowly shift them, showing communities that women’s leadership benefits everyone.
These are not “women-only add-ons” or “special measures.” They are professional design features that make the extension more effective for everyone. Transformation is possible when extension intersects with rights, collectives, and enabling policies.
WHY INVEST IN WOMEN?
Sceptics often ask: Why put so much effort into reaching women farmers? The evidence is overwhelming:
• Women are more likely to adopt sustainable practices and consider ecological impacts, making them allies in climate adaptation.
• Women invest in community outcomes — sharing knowledge, building social networks, and reinvesting in family welfare — rather than only individual gains.
• Closing the gender gap in agriculture could boost global GDP by nearly $1 trillion and reduce global food insecurity by about two percentage points, impacting 45 million people.
In short, investing in women is not charity. It is the smartest bet for productivity, resilience, and sustainability.
FROM MARGINS TO MAINSTREAM
Agricultural extension has long operated on outdated assumptions: that the “farmer” is male, that knowledge automatically flows within households, and that productivity alone is the measure of success. These assumptions have sidelined half of the farming population.
As extension professionals, remind yourself:
• Participation ≠ empowerment.
• Empowerment ≠ transformation.
• True empowerment shifts power, agency, and control.
• True transformation shifts systems and norms, not just individuals.
As extension professionals, ask yourself:
• Do your programs treat women as legitimate farmers, or as “helpers”?
• Do your indicators measure empowerment, or just attendance?
• Do your technologies address women’s tasks, or only men’s?
• Does your research disaggregate data by gender, caste, and class, or present “farmers” as a homogenous group?
Your answers will determine whether extension remains relevant in a feminising agriculture, or whether it continues to reproduce exclusion.
If India and other countries are serious about achieving food security, climate resilience, and inclusive growth, the extension system must change its course. That means:
• Recognising women as farmers in their own right.
• Designing technologies and services that respond to their realities.
• Creating platforms that amplify women’s voices and leadership.
• Bundling knowledge with rights, resources, and institutional support.
And integrating any of the above in extension is not mission creep nor beyond the mandate. These have always been implied, but were never put into active practice.
Women already sustain agriculture with invisible labour. The real question is whether extension services will continue to ignore them — or finally help transform their labour into power, recognition, and leadership.
THE CALL
Feminisation of agriculture is not an anomaly. It is the future. But feminisation must not mean feminisation of poverty and burden. It must mean feminisation of empowerment, leadership, and resilience.
As extension professionals, we hold the tools to make that shift. The question is whether we have the courage to use them.
Stop asking how to “include” women. Start building systems that work for women. Only then will extension truly serve ‘farmers.’
Dr. Ranjitha Puskur is a global leader in agricultural research for development, with nearly thirty years of international experience. She has held senior positions at CGIAR centres, including IRRI, WorldFish, ILRI, and IWMI, where she has promoted R4D on gender equality and inclusive innovation systems in food and agriculture. She can be reached at Email: r.puskur@cgiar.org
This blog effectively addresses the key question – Why must agricultural extension prioritise women? I particularly appreciated the concluding remark: “Stop asking how to ‘include’ women! Start building systems that work for women.” That truly captures the shift in mindset we need.This is exactly what we strived to do under the leadership of Dr. Ranjitha for over three years in the villages of West Bengal, through methodologies/approaches such as Socio-Technical Innovation Bundling (STIB), Multi-Stakeholder Platforms, Learning Labs, and Theory of Change (ToC), among others.
Congratulations to Dr. Ranjitha for not only highlighting the limitations of current extension practices in achieving gender equality, but also showing us how to do it better. AESA also deserves appreciation for consistently bringing forward such impactful, practice-oriented writings from experienced professionals in the field of development.
Thanks, Ranjitha, for emphasizing the stereotypes about ‘women in agriculture’ and not doing enough to bring them to the front and center of agricultural extension. The power structure in rural India hasn’t changed although there’s significant progress in many fronts including digital technologies. Your emphatic pronouncement that participation doesn’t necessarily lead to empowerment and empowerment is not enough to transform the system must ring loud in the policy circles.
The face of public extension system has changed at least in states like Kerala where you see more women extension functionaries than you would have a couple of decades ago. But, in other states the change has been painstakingly slow. There must be special drives to recruit to women extension professionals. Having done this, they must be thoroughly sensitized to target women on the farms and households and negotiate through stereotypes and patriarchy which is more vivid in rural settings.
But the cry remains: reform policies, reform policies, reform policies….
This Blog is overdue to remind Agricultural Extension System in particular and AR4D system in general to systematically prioritize, suitably revamping the design and sincerely practice extension systems to include/welcome women as rightful partners of agricultural development to achieve the dream of Vikasit Bharath by 2047. After correctly diagnosing the problem of the current state of extension services through RBET framework, the Blogger aptly recommends revamping design to avoid structure of exclusion, outdated norms and blind spots in policy and practice to reach, benefit, empower and transform women through EAS interacting in practice with rights, collectives and enabling policies to transform women labour into power, recognition, respect and leadership, which are not beyond the scope. It is argued that such an investment in women is not charity but smartest best for productivity, resilience and sustainability. It is rightly said that feminization is not a slogan, anomaly, it is the future. This powerful message is very timely to extension professions to have the courage of conviction to change course and make women real partners of change for development. Finally I must say that I have enjoyed every word, sentence of the Blog so brilliantly written by Dr.Ranjtha who happens to be my student for her Ph.D program at IARI, New Delhi nearly 30 years ago. I am proud of her transformation from a bright student with deep academic acumen and social concerns to international leader in agricultural development. Congratulations and best wishes to her for the Blog. Also, congratulations to AESA for bringing out yet another useful and timely Blog on revamping of the design of AES by recognizing women as key clients.
Very well analysed, Ranjitha. You have rightly identified the weaklinks in making women effective beneficiary in our AE system.
It is time we shift our attention from Agriculture to Food System. Women face a major challenge of accessing resources owing to the issue of their lack of entitlement of assets. While men are given the status of natural HOF, women can be given the status of the HOFS (Head of Food System), empowering them to avail certain benefits accessing resources.
Dr Ranjitha Puskur has reviewed the entire gamut of gender issues in agriculture. Her arguments have a solid research base and we all know that farm women are a marginalised section of the society. The solutions provided by Dr Ranjitha also emanate from the success achieved by various programme designers (including the author ) in several locations. It is worth trying to employ these solutions, if we are interested in feminising agriculture vis-à-vis development of farm households. All stakeholders from policy makers to field extension functionaries acknowledge the role of women in agricultural development and the need to involve them in decision making, provide access and control over resources etc., but very little was done in this regard.
Yes, we talk about huge numbers of Women Self Help Groups (10 crore women in 90 lakh SHGs) and Women Dairy Cooperatives (WDCs) but these numbers are also misleading as WDCs account for only 2.5 % of the total cooperatives in the country. We may boast of lakhpati didis but WSHGs face lot of gender discrimination and lack of support from other family members making these initiatives stifle often. These programmes are designed to empower women but the real indicator for empowerment is not participation but their access and control over resources , involvement in decision making and power sharing (as pointed out by the author) which we totally ignore.
Gender issues in agriculture were brought into limelight by Susan V Poats & others ( Gender issues in FSR, 1988) and when we tried these modules during our BIOCON ( Bio Conversion of Crop residues) project, the results were highly encouraging. This helped us in preparing the activity profile of men and women and train the women on those aspects where their involvement is very significant. Our experience in back yard poultry rearing and dairy cattle rearing is highly promising and could be tried elsewhere. Several women have been trained in artificial brooding, feeding and getting veterinary health care and services in rearing day-old chicks purchased by them (contrary to the Govt. poultry development programmes of distributing 6 weeks old chicks to the beneficiaries that too on subsidy). The egg production and consumption have gone up many folds and the women had full control on both eggs and birds.
Similarly, when the members of the Women SHGs were trained in dairy cattle management, the milk production has gone up and the spoilages were reduced. The best part is that the women had almost full control on income from sale of milk (but not from the sale of animals) and they used it exclusively for family welfare unlike men who had several other avenues to spend the dairy income. Similarly, our interventions on goat rearing with the active involvement of women is also quite encouraging.
Where there is a will there is a way.
Congratulations to Dr Ranjitha Puskur for coming out with a thought provoking blog and thanks to AESA for making it available to us.
Thanks for sharing Blog 246 by Ranjitha Puskur. Compliments to her for pointing out the need to “Prioritize Women”.
I studied the blog as the subject is of interest for me, in view of my extended involvement in ‘Sustainable Livelihood Development of Rural families in less developed areas of four states’. I am taking liberty to express my views below, based on ‘Learnings from field staff of the BAIF, the farmers & from studies by Sangeeta, my late wife, on ‘Women in Livestock Production in three states’.
1.There are very few Women involved in planning & implementation of Crop-Livestock Extension Research and Field programs. And this limits understanding and appreciation of Knowledge and Role of Women in Family Farms – practicing Mixed Farming (the most common system in rural areas).
2. I learnt that women have good knowledge about Livestock, Vegetables, Fruits& Flower crops & are good at Nursery raising and at spotting disease/pest problems.
3.Improving knowledge & skills of women is very effective in improving productivity/production and also enhancing the ‘Adoption of new methods, skills, technology,’ but a different approach (demonstrations/practical sessions) is needed as they shun long lectures.
4.The discussion should be on ‘Current/Priority problems’ and not on what may occur after a few months.
5.Communication skills and not knowing ‘Local Slang’ are limiting factors with extension officers who are hailing from urban areas.
I mentioned some of my thoughts as they occurred on reading the article.
P.S: There was no mention of livestock in the article though Crop-Livestock mixed farming is the most common system.