Gender, Digitalization, and Resilience in International Development: Failing Forward

by Julia Bello-Bravo, John William Medendorp, Anne Namatsi Lutomia and Barry Robert Pittendrigh, Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2024

Reviewed by Nidhi Tandon

Those interested in the evolving landscape of Information & Communications Technologies (ICTs); the gendered differences in applying these technologies in agricultural production cycles; and the untapped potentials for fundamentally changing how on-farm-learning can be improved through digital means, might consider reading this book. It takes a broad view on the ‘global South’ with a focus on agrarian landscapes. Importantly, as the title suggests, it applies the lens of ‘building resilience’ – terms that are increasingly intertwined with sustainability and the potential to absorb and recover from all kinds of shocks. The book draws on meta-data from across the world, with four case studies from the African continent.

The analysis is underpinned by examples from an organisation called Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) which delivers a university-based programme that ‘transforms extension information on relevant topics such as agriculture, disease and women’s empowerment, into 2D, 2.5D and 3D animations, which are then voice overlaid into a diversity of languages from around the world’. [1]

This a refreshing read on many counts, not least because the focus is less about the technologies themselves, and more about peer-to-peer learning among women in agriculture.

The research is framed within the context of building ‘resilience’ – a central facet of agricultural know-how today – to enable communities, and women in those communities, to mitigate, adapt to, and to recover from shocks. It points out the obvious, that excluding women can perpetuate and even worsen current levels of poverty, instability, and insecurity. In other words, an important destabilising factor in the building of resilience is the systemic exclusion and marginalisation of women. The book offers a few definitions of ‘development resilience’ (pp. 33, 104, 108); the term derives from the Latin verb resilire, meaning literally, ‘to jump again’, with the derivative meanings ‘to recoil’ or ‘to bounce back’ (p. 108). (I am sure there are many cultural interpretations of this word.) What surfaced is that resilience also requires spontaneity, improvising on the fly – a good description of how women de facto adapt to shocks, be they economic or environmental.

What makes this thesis any different from the conventional analyses that tend to focus on growing digital divides by gender? A few arguments stand out:

It suggests that the playing field for mobile technologies is finally levelling out – with more people able to access mobile learning applications than ever before; and that on top of the technological access to some 8 billion people (on ubiquitous platforms like WhatsApp), there is now also potential access to some 7,000 languages among thousands of cultures.
It suggests that applying a ‘learning-systems’ approach turns the conventional hierarchy of top-down learning on its head and, in some sense, has the potential to democratise and to decentralise the sharing of know-how and perspective. This is a positive for women negotiating learning in a patriarchal-leaning world.
Although not new, the authors also put an onus on the benefits of ‘failing forward’ – in other words taking a ‘genuinely scientific attitude towards disappointing outcomes’, learning from mistakes, and giving the unexpected outcomes as much credence as ‘expected’ outcomes. Among the ‘unexpected’ are the opportunistic, the disruptive, the viral (as in grassroots networked intelligence), and the novel (as in innovative and design thinking). These considerations are important particularly when it suggests that women as users also become bonafide adapters and the solutions providers – this is arguably what motivates learning and behaviour change; empowering the processes of learning as a real-time experiment – in the field.

The authors place much importance on the ‘learning-systems approach’. What I found heartening was the recognition that under such a systems approach, women are more likely to contribute to social innovation. Today’s range of mobile technologies have the potential to offer women access to a whole spectrum of game-changing solutions; enabling them to select and apply the one that works best for them.

From my experience reviewing and analysing project impacts in the field, I have found ‘positive deviance’ as an excellent source of showcasing potentials for innovative changes far beyond the original concept or planning process. This deviation – in the form of modification; adding traditional methods and know-how; drawing in an alternate set of values or perspectives; has always held for me the potential for women to reintegrate ‘other’ knowledge that has – mostly – been discounted, discredited, and excluded altogether.

The authors suggest that conventional, oppressive, and exacting top-down learning approaches or reporting requirements and the accompanying organisational arrogance that undermines or penalises deviance can be replaced with a learning system that is not only inclusive but that also encourages ‘difference’ and the messy decentralised ways of learning and ‘influencing’. In other words, women in farming communities might be more prepared to turn away from hierarchical learning systems if they have the freedom to use, share, and modify content; if the sharing of solutions is underpinned by open-source software; if they can make information usable, pertinent, and intensely localised. Engaging the curious, making all unintended consequences an occasion of learning, and using the ICTs to grow communities of practice, these are elements of movements for change.

While the book is of primary interest to those working in the nexus of women’s empowerment, climate-smart agriculture, and the application of learning tools, I also think that its premises, the examples provided, and the case study from Kenya will appeal to a much broader readership that might be interested in the maturing of technologies in the hands of women. (Of note, a 2019 case study in Kenya showed that in informal and digitalised agricultural extension systems, representation of women rose to 54 per cent as compared against formal public extension agents of whom just 32 per cent were female; p.115.) It is an evidenced-based research paper, but reads in an easy non-academic style that is easy to absorb.

Real-time innovation rests in the hands of the user. Technologies are rarely gender-neutral; they can be used to close gender gaps and/or to celebrate and amplify gender differences. Technology innovations in ‘climate-smart agriculture’ can be applied to increasing productivity and incomes; to adapting and resilience to climate change; and to reducing or removing greenhouse gas emissions. I would add to this that as women become more confident of their responsibilities not just as consumers of technology but as real-time experimenters of solutions, climate-smart agriculture will also mean for them – the ‘stewarding’ of the natural environment; the standing up to Big Pharma and iniquitous trade terms; and the influencing of diverse solutions from the ground up.

Building in multiple feedback loops into learning content encourages notions of ‘there are many alternatives’ as opposed to ‘one-solution-for-all’. Perhaps here lies the recognition that there are multiple ways for women ‘influencers’ to share solutions from the ground up. Women’s confidence, ideas, and agency to be resilient to climate change can also become agency to be resilient to patriarchy and to inequity, and if women can be part of innovative changes in the farm, they are also more likely to be part of innovative changes in the sociopolitical sphere. That is what is exciting.

Notes

1 See https://sawbo-animations.org/about/.