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Incorporating Gender-Sensitive Traits in Breeding Programs
Joint traits • Marketability,
color, size, price• Earliness• Yield • Taste• Cooking time• Uniform maturity• Storability• Nutritional value
Women’s traits• Drought
tolerance • Disease
resistance
Men’s traits
Gender-discriminated Traits(2015, Uganda and W. Kenya)
UGA
NDA
• Grain color • Grain size• Intercropping• Plant arquitecture• Palatable leaves
• Resistance to biotic stresses
• Resistance to poor soil
• Early maturity
W.
KEN
YA
How to set priorities
and maintain a gender focus when
everything is equal?
Gender roles in bean production and marketing, Uganda
Women dominated most bean production activities and also made most decisions in bean production and marketing.
The Value of Short Cooking time• Industrial processing: – Women could save 9 hours per week with pre-cooked
beans
• For home cooking: – Part of this time could be recovered with fast cooking
beans….maybe 4 or 5 hours per week
• If breeders had this sort of data on the impact of gender, they would adopt “gender traits” more readily
Incorporating Cooking Time
• Conceptual obstacles?– “We breed for productivity”
• Infrastructural limitations– Breeders work with dozens or hundreds of lines– How to quantify and scale up cooking time?
Breeding for Processing Traits is not New
Ugandan Bean Lines
The Matteson Bean Cooker• Long established
laboratory method
• Very slow – 1 sample takes 30 minutes to 2 hours
• Requires automation
Automation for Scaling up the Phenotyping
Nutrition: Gender or Biology? • Women have different nutritional needs – Iron requirements
• Biofortification seeks to address these needs with a trait (high iron) for which women may never express preference
Hb, g/L Ferritin, µg/L sTfR, mg/L Body Iron, mg/kg
-1.00
0.00
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
Low Iron
High Iron
ns
p=0.059
P<0.001
p=0.011
Effects of Biofortified Beans on Iron status of Young Women
Chan
ge in
Iron
Sta
tus
LS M
eans
bas
elin
e to
4.5
mon
ths
DRAFT-NO NOT CITE OR REPRODUCE
Nutrition: Gender or Biology?
Care-givers
Community / Family Nutrition
Specific Nutritional Needs
Women Children
Even if Nutrition is not the same as Gender…
• …it can be a priority area for interaction, and in support of breeding and adoption
• For example, Orange fleshed sweet potatoes– Visibly VERY different
• Through nutritional education, mothers became convinced that for the benefit of their children, OFSP were worth the change
• This is where gender research can intersect productively with biofortification and breeding
Conclusions• We would benefit from broader information on how general a
given preference is, especially in a dynamic environment – (not unlike an agronomic trait)
• Beyond lists of gender preferences, understanding the impact of traits with gender implications would encourage breeders to engage
• Breeding for gender traits like cooking time? Where there’s a will, there’s a way (usually)
• Nutrition? Where are the productive points of contact with breeding for nutritional value?
• Asante sana