Gender in nutrition sensitive vegetables value chain for sustainable food system in Bangladesh

Abstract

Small farmers in South Asia face various barriers to achieve nutritional security. In this paper we focus how integration to Fruit & Vegetable (F&V) value chain by technological intervention can help female farmers in Bangladesh to have nutritional improvement and dietary diversity. F&V value chain remains inefficient in rural Bangladesh because of fragmented value chains, numerous actors in the value chain, inadequate infrastructure in terms of transportation and storage facilities and social barriers and taboos immensely important for female farmers. Besides, that higher retail price, less accessibility to the markets and lack of awareness regarding nutritional benefits more particularly by women putting additional pressure to achieve the nutritional outcomes. Our preliminary survey indicates that farmers are interested to participate in the ‘LOOP’ aggregation service introduced by ‘Digital Green’ (an international NGO) under which farmers sell their vegetables and access markets through village level aggregators. By using an android app for transaction entry and SMS receipts, this intervention not only ensures reduced explicit and implicit costs, and increased profits, and consequently increases material wellbeing of farmers. We apply the conceptual framework of Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and investigates how, and to what extent LOOP ensures nutritional improvement for households with female LOOP farmers by employing a system dynamics modelling approach.