Increasing Female Enrollment for Agricultural Programs of Study in Sub-Saharan Africa: What Motivates Women to Pursue Careers in Agriculture?

Abstract

Women in developing countries, especially in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), play a critical role in ensuring food security and sovereignty for their families and nations. Unfortunately, in spite of this, their significance in the agricultural sector is seldom fully appreciated. Further, very few women in SSA are professionally trained agriculturists (Beintema & Di Marcantonio, 2009; Kanté, Edwards, & Blackwell, 2013), which has likely contributed to their low productivity per hectare in the agricultural sector compared to their male counterparts (O'Sullivan, Rao, Banerjee, Gulati, & Vinez, 2014). This study investigated the experiences of young, aspiring female agriculturists from Uganda who were members of Young Farmers’ Clubs (YFC) at high school to understand better how their club experiences may have impacted their career choices. Findings indicate the participants’ YFC activities, especially supervised agripreneurship projects (SAPs) and field trips, had transformative impacts on their choosing to study agriculture. However, gender stereotypes associated with females pursuing agricultural careers were still prevalent and discouraged them from becoming professional agriculturists. More research should be conducted about the impact of subjective norms (Ajzen, 1991) on females preparing to pursue careers in agriculture.

Challenges to Sustaining University-Community Partnerships in War-Torn, Northern Uganda: Investigating Resistance, Negative Stereotyping, and Gender Bias in Agricultural Students’ Attachments

“…In accord, findings of this study indicated that women's sense of agency was limited in both domains. The struggles of women in agricultural careers as well as related academic majors in developing countries has been documented (Beintema, 2006;James & Denis, 2015), and in Uganda in particular (Mukembo, Uscanga, Edwards, & Brown, 2017). However, the challenge of engaging women in university-community partnerships, such as through student internship programs, warrants more attention.…”

Influencing factors for pursuing agriculture as a career for agriculture undergraduates: a two-stage approach

“…Scholars are adding components to the TPB to enhance its capacity for behavior prediction and to give an explanation for why good intentions do not always translate into action, to the need to explain BI in many circumstances (Arunrat et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2013). Although the TPB has been used to explain behavior in research relating to agriculture (for example, Mukembo et al, 2017;Tiraieyari & Krauss, 2018), the framework has not yet been speci cally designed for the agricultural industry. It is necessary to do further research to fully grasp the effects of agricultural knowledge, education, learning motivation, the advancement of sustainable agriculture, and the connections between agriculture and other social elements of the undergraduate agricultural experience (Sitienei & Morrish, 2014).…”