Engaging Men in HOD: What is it about?

Helvetas Ethiopia implemented a project entitled ‘’Empowering Women for Improved Food and Nutrition Security (EWIFNS) under the Gender Climate Change Agriculture Support Programme (GCCASP), NEPAD for the period from 1 August -15 December 2019.  The focus of the project was empowering women in food and nutrition security and resilience to climate change related shocks. To achieve the objective with effective collaboration at household level and to avoid double work load of women due to introduction of the labour-intensive homestead orchard development (HOD) practices, Helvetas facilitated the voluntary participation of husbands of those beneficiary women on HOD trainings. This is mainly related with views that engaging a woman/wife in a certain intervention can’t automatically bring empowerment to her unless there are supportive environments either at home or at public. Empowerment in this specific case is the capability that a woman must influence her husband or any family member to collaborate with her to get the work done, have sufficient knowledge and confidence to generate own income whatever the amount could be, making decision on household consumption, spending and saving at household level.

Accordingly, 50% beneficiary women’s husbands received both conceptual and practical training on HOD.  In this case, engagement of men helped the successful construction of the ring basin infiltration pit and permagardening including intensive soil treating practices before planting seeds and seedlings. They helped their wives with double digging of the ring basin.

"After receiving the training on homestead orchard development, I and my wife constructed the ring basin infiltration pit, prepared permagarden, treated soil and planted different seasonal vegetables and fruits. We also planted perineal plants such as 30 Geshos, 4 Coffees, 2 Mangos and 3 Lemmon’s, and all the seedlings are at good condition. We are consuming vegetables that are essential to growth and health of our children and to ourselves as well. From the permagarden, we harvested 1 quantal of Garlic. My wife sold one kg in Kozba market for ETB 60 and we would keep it to sale in a better price near future.

As I understood from the training, my wife is the one who decides on it as she is the direct project beneficiary and I am her assistant in this case.  I feel happy for engaging in the training and getting insights on this rewarding practice that we harvested such unbelievable amount from a small plot that we used to harvest for only a week consumption. My contribution in this case is mainly labour as a complement to her plans as she has very impressive ideas and plans. As per my observation from my neighbours, who engaged in the project, doing very good. I realized that HOD intervention is interesting to all. Now we feed our children from our vegetables harvest. If I weren’t in the training, we wouldn’t be as effective as we are now. Thus, it is essential to engage men to certain level in interventions that focus on women."    Ato Girmay  Halayu

Reported by Alemitu Golda and Mengist Dereje