Gender-transformative agricultural experimentation and decision-making: Piloting GALS tools in Tanzania

Gender transformative change in agrifood systems involves understanding gender dynamics and norms and intentionally strengthening or shifting structures, practices, and relations towards equality. An important research issue is how to spark critical reflection and action that foster transformative change among participants and programme staff alike. Household Methodologies (including the Gender Action Learning System methodology) are a potential mechanism for achieving this aim. This paper follows a research process to pilot and adapt Gender Action Learning System tools in workshops with farmers in Tanzania in 2021. The study was based on prior work in Malawi. Tools were partly redesigned to provide farmers with gender-transformative decision support tools they could deploy in innovation processes. Asking what we can learn from women and men's experiences with the tools in terms of their challenges and progress towards gender transformative change, we evaluate field notes and transcriptions from workshops and follow up visits. We add a layer of reflexivity by considering our own insights into the preconditions required for effective transformation. Findings show that the workshops stimulated considerable discussion in the host villages in Tanzania and that many though not all of the participants considered they had made significant commitments to more equity in intra-household decision making, particularly around expenditures and farm planning. While taking steps towards more gender equality, farmers remain confronted with larger dynamics that lock them into vulnerable livelihoods. Questions persist about how to situate gender transformative processes in broader contexts that deny farmers' significant agency over their lives. Researchers themselves, social scientists and biophysicists, need to confront their own situatedness into hierarchical learning processes, as well as consider the implications of their different world views for the research process.