Transforming Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Female Entrepreneur Awards Competition into a Women Empowerment Programme

The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) has been running the Female Entrepreneur Awards (DAFF FEA) competition since 1999 to empower and increase participation of women in the sector. This competition is viewed in isolation from the programmes of the Department and as an event for celebrating women´s month in August. Whilst the sector continues to face women empowerment challenges, transformation still remains the biggest challenge for the sector. The uncoordinated planning and implementation by government, with each programme designing its own implementation plan, has lead to a fragmented scattering of projects across the sector’s landscape. Without an integrated approach and effective management of actions, roles and responsibilities, most women empowerment strategies and programmes devised by DAFF, results in ineffective implementation due to uncoordinated and disjointed gendered approach, applied to implement programmes and policies for the sector The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries does not have a gender policy. Partly for that reason, it continues to use `first come first serve‘ as a criteria to allocate resources in the sector. Gender mainstreaming which aims to integrate the gender dimensions into relevant policies and activities rather than addressing gender in isolation, is recommended as a tool to implement transformation in the sector. The study concludes by recommending that strengthening the institutional mechanisms to coordinate and enhance support for women in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, will help to achieve women‘s empowerment. The study also seeks to contribute to an enabling environment for transformation. This requires an application of gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) for all producer support programmes of the department. Furthermore, the study recommends that DAFF develops a gender policy to mandate the sector to integrate the gender dimension into relevant policies and activities, rather than address gender through a separate and isolated process.