The world’s premier international development agency and a catalytic actor, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) drives development results. Its work advances US national security, economic prosperity, and demonstrates American generosity. It promotes a path to recipient’s self-reliance and resilience.
Partnered with PepsiCo, the agency has started a pilot project to impart potato production training to women in West Bengal with a view to making them independent female farmers, and raising their participation rate in agriculture, which varies from an abysmal 1–15 per cent from district to district. The project is becoming successful for example, a housewife who informally helped her potato-farmer husband in the fields is now an ‘agri-preneur’ in her own right. She cultivated chip-grade potatoes on one acre of land for PepsiCo India along with six other women, and together they earned a tidy profit of ` 14,000.
There are 500-odd women farmers in West Bengal to receive the training—how to prepare the land for sowing of potatoes, how to harvest, and a lot of things among others. One of the key sourcing centres for PepsiCo, West Bengal provides around 25 per cent of direct procurement of potatoes. Overall, PepsiCo has a strength of 27,000 farmers across 14 States in India. They have announced a US$ 20-million partnership to drive inclusivity across the food and beverage industry across the world.
Focus on Women
PepsiCo–USAID believe that investing in women is key to advancing a country along its journey to self-reliance. Through the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Fund, USAID and PepsiCo aim to promote economic opportunities and leadership roles for women farmers. PepsiCo expects to reach 1,500 women farmers during 2020–21. Many of them are already part of farmer households that supply to PepsiCo.
West Bengal has generally small landholders. Getting land for cultivation is the biggest challenge. So, apart from providing training support, the company also supports women by helping them lease the land for cultivation of potatoes. Expectedly, the training programme will include more than 3,00,000 women through direct and community engagement.
Sadly, women do not get much importance though they play a crucial supporting role in potato cultivation in the State.
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The Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP), launched in 2019, is a White House-led initiative and is the first-ever whole-of-government effort to advance global women’s economic empowerment. It seeks to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2025 through focusing on three pillars—women prospering in the workforce, women succeeding as entrepreneurs, and women enabled in the economy. It reached 12 million women through a series of US government activities, public-private partnerships, and the innovative W-GDP Fund in its first year.
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Courtesy: Business Line, pepsico.com