Building Bridges Educating women in agriculture and building a bridge of knowledge between rural and

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Building BridgesEducating women in agriculture
and building a bridge of knowledge between rural
and urban communities

• Ragnhildur Sigurðardóttir

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Icelandic Agriculture

• Number of farms 3286
• Average age of farmers 53 years
• Typical family farm size
• Dairy farm 35 cows
• Sheep farm 400 -500 winter fed sheep

• Surface of Iceland 103.022 km2
• Population
• Urban 269.461
• Rural 21.109
• Total 290.570

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Active farmers 2004

• Men 3500 (4,8 of the total working force)
• Women 1800 (2,8 of the total working force)
• Women are only 13,5 of all directors in
  Agriculture firms
• Data from Hagstofa Islands

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Grassroot organisation of women in Icelandic
agriculture

• Established 15. october 2002
• Open women organisation in the Icelandic
  farming community
• The current communication network includes about
  300 women

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The framework for the grass root organisasjon

• Promoting the role of women in agriculture,
  strengthening the farming community and ensuring
  that consumers of agricultural products are
  satisfied and well informed.

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Is this organisation necessery?

• Why?

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Women in agriculture

• Research has shown that the situasjon for women
  in agriculture is that they feel isolated in the
  rural area, they dont have equal opportunities to
  men in the sector and their social status and
  status as business people is low. The change of
  finding new opportunities are often difficult in
  rural areas

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Men and women in borders and committys for the
different ministers 1990 - 2003
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Age of farmers in 2003 Hagstofa Íslands, 2004
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Why are you living on a farm?
From the rapport Eignarhald kvenna í
atvinnurekstri og landbúnaði, 2005
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North Iceland 1998 Women partisipating in the
sosial structure of the farmers Association

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How do the women see the future?

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Stronger and more visible women stronger and
more visible agriculture

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What can we do?

• Work in the grass root (the farm women know what
  they want) with f.ex. the ministry of
  agriculture, the farmers association and the
  agricultural university
• Create more active women that work for ther
  sector on ther own terms
• Open access to professional and sosial
  improvements at home
• Celebrate the internasjonal rural womens day
  (15.october)
• partisipate in Icelandic, and international
  procekts

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What are we doing?

• Working together, learning from each other
• Making educational material about live in rural
  aereas
• Visiting schools and kindergardens
• Presentations in shops and other public places
• Website
• Courses, meetings, e mail, etc.

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Building bridges

• Application for 2 year European Union
  Vocational training programme, Leonardo da Vinci,
  for women in agriculture.
• Trans national project between Denmark, Germany,
  Italy, Chech Republic, Slovakia and Iceland
• Agricultural universities, educational
  consultants, coalition for gender equality,
  business- and equal rights consultants and grass
  root organisasjons of women in agriculture

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Building bridges

• The aim of this project is to involve and
  stimulate farm women who are active in
  agricultural communities to become mentors for
  other farm women in each participating country.
  They will recive training for exemple in
  motivation methods for self empowerment, how to
  organice and manage meetings, how to build up a
  network of farm women etc. Either via active
  participation in the agricultural community or
  through furter education

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Expectations

• Improved self esteem among women in agriculture
• Better understanding among women farmers of the
  social structure of ther industry works
• More women in positions of power in the sector
• Less change of women leaving the rural aereas
• Pleased and well informed consumers
• Strong and colorful farm industry