Volume 4, Number 1
April 1998
Gender and Extension Services
According to Tom Carter, an FAO advisor to the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) of India, the NDDB promotes, finances, and provides training and consulting support to a dairy cooperative movement that includes more than 10 million members of more than 70,000 cooperatives. In most parts of India, dairying is primarily a woman's responsibility. Unfortunately, it is men who have become the major share of members in dairy cooperatives. The percentage of women has increased as a result of the Dairy Board's efforts, but still is only around 20 percent (somewhat higher in terms of active members). The Dairy Board initiated a cooperative development program with a strong emphasis on increasing women's membership about 8 years ago. This has been followed by a pilot project in four districts where an intensive effort has been made to accelerate the process of women not only becoming active members, but also assuming both elected positions and filling an increasing number of extension and district cooperative union management jobs.
The results of the pilot projects, which were conducted over a two-year period, have been sufficiently encouraging that the NDDB now plans to work with up to 35 self-selected district cooperative unions to enable women members to become a majority in terms of membership and elected leaders at village cooperative and union levels.
