Science4Parliament Podcast – Dr Sophia Huyer – Episode 13 – Climate Research, Food Security and Gender Equality.

Welcome to the Science4Parliament podcast,  the first podcast that aims to foster the relationship between science and decision-makers and show how research and innovation are vital to the equitable and sustainable functioning of our societies and economies. 
   
It is presented by Denis Naughten, a directly elected Member of Parliament in Ireland for nearly three decades. Denis has served as an Irish cabinet minister and on the Council of European Union Ministers and is currently chairperson of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Working Group on Science and Technology, based in Geneva, which aims to inspire global parliamentary action through legislative work in the field of science and technology. 
   
The podcast aims to highlight the work of innovative people in the world of science and to get their perspective on what needs to be done to bring that world and the world of policy closer together. 
   
In this episode, Denis talks to Dr Sophia Huyer, the gender and social inclusion lead for the programme Accelerating the Impact of Climate Research in Africa  (AICCRA) at the International Livestock Research Institute in Dakar in Senegal. Dr Huyer has been publishing and presenting on global gender equality issues in relation to technology innovation and sustainable development for over 20 years. In this episode of the podcast, she talks about what is being done,  not only to research the impacts of climate change but to find solutions and communicate this information to local communities in Africa to help make a difference to small farmers and especially women’s quality of life.

 More information on Dr. Sophia Huyer
Email:        s.huyer@cgiar.org
Websites: https://aiccra.cgiar.org/people/sophia-huyer
                   wisat.org (WISAT)
                   ccafs.cgiar.org (CCAFS)
X:                   https://x.com/CGIARAfrica
                    https://x.com/sophiahuyer
LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophia-huyer-a9241512/
         

Contacts for Denis Naughten:
Email:          dnaughten@gmail.com
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-naughten
X:               https://x.com/DenisNaughten
Blog:         https://substack.com/@denisnaughten
Web:         https://denisnaughten.ie/

Transcript

Science4Parliament Podcast – Dr Sophia Huyer – Episode 13 – Climate research, Food security and Gender equality.

SPEAKERS

Dr Sophia Huyer, Denis Naughten

Denis  00:00

Welcome to the Science for Parliament podcast, the first podcast that aims to foster the relationship between science and decision makers and to show how research and innovation are vital to the equitable and sustainable functioning of our societies and economies. My name is Denis Naughten, and I'm your host. This podcast aims to highlight the work of some of the innovative people who are trying to bring the world of science and policy closer together. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Sophia Huyer, gender and social inclusion lead for the accelerating the impact of climate research in Africa, program based in Dakar in Senegal, Sophia, you're very welcome. Sophia has been publishing and presenting on global gender equality issues in relation to technology innovation and sustainable development for over 20 years. Before we start, I'm going to ask you something slightly different. I'm going to look for two numbers from you for two conversational questions that I'm going to throw at you during the interview. So, can you pick two numbers between one and 10, please? 

Sophia  01:08

Okay, yes, three and eight.

Denis  01:11

Three and eight. That's great. So, Sophia, maybe to start off, can I ask you what Accelerating the Impact of Climate Research in Africa programme is all about,

Sophia  01:23

We call it AICCRA. It's the program of the CGIAR, which is, you might know, is an international consortium of agricultural research institutes in across the global South. It builds on an earlier program of about eight years long on working with farmers, smallholder farmers in developing regions or in Global South regions of Africa, Latin America and Asia, on helping them or supporting them to adjust to the impacts of climate change in their farming. And so it is about production techniques that are water conserving, feeds and other crops and seeds and inputs that are resilient to the impacts of climate, such as drought or flooding or rainfall variability, irrigation techniques and climate information for farmers, so that they have a better idea of when to plan their planting and their harvesting and how to plan their agricultural production. So this program is now building on this and focusing on Africa. So for the past three years, we have been focusing on six countries in Africa. West African countries are Senegal, Ghana and Mali, and in East and Southern Africa, we're working in Kenya, Ethiopia and Zambia. 

Sophia  02:34

So in each of those countries, we're working in three to five communities. So there are differences in environment, in elevation, in crop or livestock production, in weather conditions within countries, as well as across countries. But for example, in West Africa, the Senegal group is focusing a lot on livestock. So livestock management, as well as dairy production, work with pastoralists. That's also a focus of part of the work in Ethiopia and Kenya. In Mali, we're focusing on rice production with Africa rice, as well as work around technologies to support farmers production. In Ghana, they're working in about five different communities, largely around crop production, vegetable production. So a village near Accra is focusing on market production for sale in the capital city, whereas the remote communities are focusing on other approaches, as well as organic manures and more self-reliant approaches to production, food production and food security. Kenya has a mixture. Ethiopia is very largely livestock focused. And when we talk about livestock, we talk about cows and beef, but women's livestock is also part of this, and that's goats and poultry. And so we look at the different range of livestock, and Zambia is looking at different private sector approaches for crop production, aquaculture work with youth enterprises and so forth. So you can see there's a mixture across the board of the different approaches that we're using. And so the idea is to build on what has been done before in the CGI, our system across all of the 11 years so research institutes, but also to move them all forward for the African context, to support African smallholder farmers to be able to adapt to climate change and to really increase food production and their quality of life. 

Denis  04:26

Yeah, so you're taking a different type of farming practice in different countries, or where there's different challenges, I suppose, from those learnings, then to apply it more broadly across Africa, building what they've done elsewhere. Can you tell me a little bit maybe about the CGIAR. What exactly it is. I know it's a French based organization, if I remember correctly. Tell us a bit about that briefly.

 Sophia  04:49

So the CGIAR is an organization in the global South. It is headquartered in France, but with the exception of two institutions, one in Italy and one in the US, the majority of the institutions, they call them centers, research centers, are in either Africa, Latin America or Asia. This organization has been around for a long time, you know, two or three decades, and has been at the forefront of some of the innovations around the world in food security. So it focuses on food security agricultural production and some of the issues around it. So there's the International Water Management Institute which looks at water management for food production and agriculture. There is ICRISAT, which is an organization that focuses a lot on digital technologies to support food production and extension and data gathering. There is the Center for Maize and Wheat, which focuses, obviously on production of Maize and Wheat. And there's the International Research Institute for rice production, IRRI, which was actually the origin or the home of the Green Revolution. So it has been around for quite a long time in different formats. These institutes or centers are all separate, but they're together in a network that works together around different topics, and so they'll have now about 10 cross center programs where they collaborate.

Denis  06:11

Great. It's interesting, and it's great to see that it's working, you know, maybe in countries where there's less research capacity historically. Let me just take a step back now for a second and ask you a more casual question. So one of the questions that you've selected is, what is the last enjoyable film that you saw? 

Sophia  06:32

The last enjoy, well, the last enjoyable film is not a new film. It's a very old film that I really ones are always the best. Oh, the old ones are all, oh, there's so many good films, actually, but there's two, let me say there's two. One is called Frogs, which is actually filmed in 1972 and it's a bit of a horror film. But what it's a horror film about is that nature is getting back at humans for all the toxins that they're leaving in the environment. So it's a swamp that has decided to kill humans, so the snakes and the frogs ....

Denis  07:05

Respond back?

Sophia  07:05

Yes. And the second one is actually more recent, is the latest Michael Caine movie called The Great. The Great Escaper, where he is in a retirement home with his wife in the UK, and kind of so-called escapes to France for D-Day celebrations because he's a veteran. Yeah, and it's just out, and it's really a nice movie as well. So those are my two

Denis  07:33

I'll definitely have to look it up. So coming back to the conversation that we've been having, and you have made the point that first of all, your networked with organizations right across the globe that are looking at agriculture and food security based issues. You also have six research programs that you're involved with across Africa looking at different types of farming practice, different types of climate challenges, but you've been doing a lot of work, particularly on the whole area of gender related issues, and how do men and women have different experiences of climate change and food security? 

Sophia  08:16

Okay, there are two or, well, two or three major differences that I can talk to. One is that across the global South, women and men have really different activities around the household and the farm. And so, women's work tends to be very much focused on household activities, care of the family, cooking, even their agricultural activities tend very much to be focused on growing food for the family, vegetables for the family dietary diversity, women and girls and children as well, are often responsible for fetching water and fetching fuel wood for the home needs. So, there's that side of things, but as a result, women have much less time for paid work, and so they have much less access to resources such as credit or income profits from their work, and as well, in many communities across the global South, women still play less of a role in the what they call, we call the public sphere. You know, they're considered to be mostly responsible for the home and household and family. And so what we find in the agriculture context, and it has particular implications in relation to climate change, is that women do not interact with extension agents, for example, for their production, for household diet, food and diets, so they don't have extension agents. How do we talk about their agricultural information? You know, governments or NGOs or the international community will provide information to farmers on agricultural production and climate and women will not have that same access, partly because they are considered to be working in the house and not available for the meetings, and partly because they don't have access to the same access to mobile phones or cell phones. So they don't have the access to the information to be able to implement it. They tend to do most of the manual labor around the house, and so their time is really taken up with taking care of the family, doing the manual labor even in their agricultural production. So they face a number of deficits that affect their ability to grow food productively, to deal with the impacts of climate change and to take their products to market. 

Sophia  10:19

So that's one of the big differences they face, and part of this is their ability to make decisions in the public sphere, in terms of in communities and community organizations, and even in the household, their areas of decision making are very delineated. So that is one of the concerns for women around climate in particular. And then, when you add the impacts of climate on environments, locally, women are often the ones who have to make up the difference. And so, if there's water shortages, they have to farther to collect the water, or they have health implications at home. So, for example, in one community in Rwanda, heavy rains had taken out the water source of a community. And so, women had families had less water, for sanitation, for bathing, for cleaning, and so they were starting to have related health impacts, you know, eye infections and things like that. So, you know, women are expected to take up a slack on that, as well as climate impacts, food production and affects economies at the local level. Then it tends to be the men and the young men who migrate for work. And so, then women are left at home with kind of this, doing their own work, as well as taking over for the work that the men and their family are no longer able to do. So those are two or three of some of the really main issues. And then you have disasters such as flooding or droughts, where women are really at risk of either gender-based violence or at risk of not being able to feed their families, whereas men are more mobile and more able to avoid those sorts of problems. 

Denis  11:52

Yeah, women are effectively more tied physically to the than as a result of that yes, and then more vulnerable to the impact of climate change as a knock-on impact. And this comes back to a broader issue as well, in terms of this whole barrier, in terms of access to information, access to digital information, and the digital divide that we hear so much about, because it's not just a digital divide between North and South. It is a digital divide even within communities. And how are you trying to overcome this information deficit? Because the reality is that you cannot make informed decisions if you don't have access to the information in the first place. So how are you trying to overcome this?

 Sophia  12:38

So AICCRA is working at different levels to overcome this deficit. So at the very top level, we're working with meteorological agencies and government agencies and information agencies and ministries to get the best information that we can help them get. And so we're putting helping them put together information platforms that we're calling ag data hubs. And these are digital hubs that pull together a lot of different information on weather trends, but also on agriculture trends, for example, prices of livestock and markets so that farmers can understand what the current livestock prices are. So we're helping governments, meteorological agencies, agriculture ministries, put all this information together on one platform that is accessible to the agricultural extension network, so they can access the information that's useful for, you know, the week, the month, the season, and then put it in formats that are useful for different groups of farmers in the country. And so some of those formats are mobile based. So there are partnerships with mobile companies. In Ghana, it's with Esoko and in Senegal, it's with Jokalante to provide this information in different formats. And when we say different formats, it could be SMS, text-based voice SMS, where people send an SMS and get a voice recording back, digital video in some cases, and radio in other cases. So in terms of my work around with women and youth and kind of the underrepresented or less advantaged groups, we're finding that in very remote communities, radio is actually the main source of information for agro climatic information. So you know the digital gap, there's a gender gap, but there's also kind of a rural urban gap. And so farmers in the rural areas not only don't have access to the same kind of incomes or technical literacy that you may find in the urban areas, the networks are also not as extensive and not as reliable the mobile networks in the rural areas. So often there's a mix of of information technologies and dissemination strategies that are needed. 
We found that for women, radio is really, really effective. And even with the mobile based services that women use, they tend to use the voice enabled services. So, they tend to either call up a number and listen to a recording or they do the voice SMS. So, for them, voice is still very, very important for women in rural areas. Also, you know, in general, for farmers, it's the low cost, easy to access, not very complicated or high tech, that seems really to be the most common denominator at this point. In getting information out, and then combining agro-information with climate information is also very, very effective. So, for example, there's, you know, there's some avian flu in the region in West Africa. So it's, you know, it's important to get that kind of information out as well. And in some cases, in Zambia, they're looking at using this same platform to provide information on health such as cholera, malaria and so forth. And that kind of information would be really useful to women as well in terms of their care, care duties, in their household, in our community. So we're looking to pull all of this together in ways that are usable for not only governments, but farmers. Federations also act as platforms to disseminate information, and we're also starting to work with women's associations at the local level as kind of nodes of information dissemination for women in the community. 

Denis  16:03

Yeah, that's very interesting. And it's interesting as well that you're not just looking at it from disseminating information regarding agriculture and food security issues, but also health issues, using the same infrastructure to get those messages across. And speaking of getting messages across. Can I ask you, what have you seen or experienced as possibly the biggest issues that you faced when trying to bring these issues to the decision makers or policy makers? 

Sophia  16:31

Yeah, there's, I'd say there's a few issues making it understandable to decision makers, because, you know, scientists do have this problem of being very, very technical and very detailed, and sometimes the message kind of gets lost. But you know, we've done some research on that in the past, and what we find is requires some sort of ongoing relationship, so you need to find a way to get in touch with the decision makers, and whether that's a Science Policy Forum, whether it's meetings such as, you know, climate conferences, whether it's regional meetings, such as the Africa Climate Summit or whatever, there needs to be some sort of forum where policymakers and scientists can interact. And I think that's what we found is really important, but we also need to be sure that the evidence that we give to policymakers is really solid, and so that the science is rigorous. The methodologies are recognized and rigorous as well, and that we can really say to them, this is what we know. We're pretty sure this is the case. You know, this is, this is the best knowledge that we can pull together using, you know, the best methodologies that we are aware of. And you know, it's also important for it's as important for gender issues as it is important for anything else, because there are common issues across the region, but there are differences as well. And so it's really important to understand what the commonalities are, but what the differences are. And then part of the focus of Acra is then developing the solutions. So it's okay, it's, you know, it's one thing to let people know what the problem is and that there is a problem. But the really important thing, especially now, in terms of where we are in the in the climate crisis globally, we really need to be talking about solutions and adaptation for people and what policymakers can do to support that. 

Denis  18:11

Yeah, and I think that's one of the frustrating things that MPs come across, is that everyone's very quick to tell us what the problems are, but there are very few people coming up with practical solutions, and I think the work that you're doing at the moment can act as very sound case studies, not just for other rural communities in addressing issues of climate related food production, but also help members of parliament and ministers in making the decisions, some of them complex decisions that they need to make. Just Can I ask you go back then to some of these casual questions. And the question that you had selected number eight was, if you were an animal or a bird, what would you be?

Sophia  18:53

Okay? Well, since I'm a birder, I'm a bird enthusiast, I'll choose a bird. And I think I would, this might be a funny choice, but I would love to be a pelican.

Denis  19:06

Why would you like to be a pelican? 

Sophia  19:08

Because pelicans have a good life, and they have a lot of fun. They float around on the water. They're very comfortable. They eat as much fish as they want, and they're unique individuals. So yeah, 

Denis  19:21

Sophia, can I thank you for your time on the Science for Parliament podcast and giving us your perspective on the impact of climate change and food security. And as always, if listeners have any questions or queries, they can email me at denis.naughten@oireachtas.ie, you can get in touch by text. Just click on the link in the information page, and you can listen to all the episodes of Science for Parliament podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So until the next time, thanks for listening.