Does Group Farming Empower Rural Women? India’s Experience with Bina Agarwal

Few programs for economically empowering rural women focus primarily on farming—the one occupation in which women have the most experience in largely agrarian economies. Thus, two Indian initiatives–in Telangana and Kerala– stand out. These initiatives are unique because they seek to improve women’s livelihoods within agriculture through an innovative institutional form, namely group farming. In this seminar, Bina Agarwal examines whether pooling land, labor, and capital and cultivating jointly, enables women farmers to overcome resource constraints and outperform individual male farmers in the same regions.

Bina Agarwal, Professor of Development Economics and Environment, University of Manchester; Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor, University of Cambridge