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Farzana Ashraf, 38 years old is living in Village Naran Mughlan, Chakwal, Punjab, Pakistan with her parents. She is a progressive farmer and change maker. Her struggle to change the lives of women farmers dates back to 2005 when she started organizing ad training them. In her area, women have a major share in the workload but often disregarded from participation in any kind of agriculture schemes, awareness sessions and economic benefits.
Farzana took the first step of changing lives by forming women committees in 10 villages of Chakwal. Each committee comprised of 10 women farmers. Assisted by a team of five people, they started exploring about the problems behind low productivity of women farmers.
After sequence of interviews with (women) farmers, her team found out that wheat is major crop of the area and farmers are heavily reliant on this. However, wheat production remains very low due to low quality seeds and lack of access to the markets. Since women farmers lacked land ownership, only males participated in the agriculture’s scheme/projects introduced in the area. Women farmers were dejected and thinking about to have some other business as agriculture was falling well short of fulfilling their needs.
Farzana Ashraf and her team started holding meetings and awareness sessions with the female farmer committees improving their knowledge and skills for better productivity. In 2007, she was able to register the women farmer committees at the district level and linked them with a seed distribution scheme/project. Most promising feature of this scheme/project was that wheat seeds were distributed directly to the women farmers (instead of males), they grew the Wheat/Seeds and then at the end of the season they had to return the same amount of Wheat seed to RFWU for distributing among more women farmers in the next season.
Good quality seeds not only multiplied but also improved wheat production. It also enhanced the confidence of women farmers to grow more.
Farzana Ashraf and her team thought about reducing the reliance of women framers to grow only Wheat and came up with idea of growing the organic vegetables. Farzana’s team trained the women farmers on growing vegetables. Along with this they were provided trainings on rainwater harvesting techniques and marketing including exploring new markets.
This was not all Farzana had to offer to her fellow women farmers. With this idea, she established RFWU in 2008, a platform to facilitate, train and support female farmers.
The piece of land was smartly zoned to grow citrus over 5 kanals, seasonal vegetables over 2.5 kanals and grapes on the remaining 2.5 kanals. Grapes section is home to 140 plants. Through this smart agriculture, Farzana is able to raise income which is also sufficient to fund salaries of staff which has now grown to 25 comprising 20 females and 5 males. Farzana was managing her farm successfully with her team and selling organic vegetables and fruits at good rate in big markets of Islamabad and other cities.
RFWU is also supporting other 1400 women farmers of her village as well as living in nearby villages by providing them seeds, technical trainings, marketing trainings and other support etc.
