2026: Worldwide 12 months of Ladies Farmers
By Vimlendra Sharan, FAO Consultant for Sri Lanka and the Maldives
When Sri Lanka talks about “the farmer”, the psychological image continues to be too usually a person in a paddy discipline. But throughout our agriculture and plantation economies, it’s girls who plant, weed, harvest, course of, type, and promote whereas additionally carrying the invisible workload of water, gas, care, cooking, and group life. The UN’s declaration of 2026 because the Worldwide 12 months of the Girl Farmer will not be a ceremonial footnote. It’s a reminder that our nationwide meals safety, and the resilience of rural livelihoods, rests on girls whose labour stays undercounted, underpaid, and below supported. Too usually girls farmers stay unserved by establishments in how we design extension companies, goal investments or form management in farmer organisations and worth chains.
2026 because the Worldwide 12 months of the Girl Farmer provides the nation a well timed alternative, not solely to have a good time girls’s work, however to consolidate features already underway and speed up reforms that may unlock additional progress. The aim is to not level fingers. It’s to acknowledge a sensible fact: when girls farmers have equitable entry to sources and decision-making, the entire meals system turns into extra productive, resilient, and inclusive.
There’s encouraging momentum to construct on. Sri Lanka has a powerful basis of group networks, girls’s teams, and native enterprise supporting family meals safety and diversification. Many ladies farmers have demonstrated outstanding innovation, adopting climate-smart practices, strengthening home-based manufacturing, and protecting farms operating by means of financial stress and climatic shocks. Improvement companions, civil society, and public establishments have additionally expanded consideration to gender in agriculture, with rising emphasis on expertise improvement, market linkages, and ladies’s participation.
FAO’s work and evaluation in Sri Lanka have strengthened each the significance of girls in agriculture and the necessity to go additional significantly by means of extra systematic gender mainstreaming throughout insurance policies and programmes. The steering is constructive: determine girls’s technical coaching wants, develop entry to applicable equipment and companies, strengthen girls’s inclusion in farmer organizations, and enhance information so insurance policies could be higher focused and tracked.
Concrete examples from FAO-supported initiatives present how this interprets into girls’s empowerment in follow: in Puttalam, fisherwoman Susila Kanthi sustained her household by means of the 2022 disaster with FAO emergency money help, made potential by means of help from the UK’s International, Commonwealth & Improvement Workplace, a lifeline that helped her cowl every day wants and medical bills and return to the lagoon with dignity; in Monaragala, Nirosha Dilmini remodeled 1 / 4 acre into the yield of a full acre by means of FAO’s GAP coaching and gear, delivered with funding from Australia’s Division of International Affairs and Commerce (DFAT), growing earnings, securing grocery store linkages and cultivating year-round regardless of local weather shocks; in Anuradhapura, Malani Senehelatha boosted the profitability of her onion seed enterprise utilizing rain shelters and improved methods launched by means of a Authorities of Canada–supported FAO initiative, turning information and expertise into larger, extra dependable incomes; in Galkiriyagama, Priyanthi Kumari Ekanayake, supported by the EU-funded RiceUp mission, harvested over 150 bushels of licensed seed paddy from 1.5 acres, rising as a high quality seed producer and function mannequin in her group; and in Kandy and Bandarawela, college students like Piumi Madhubashini Kumarasinghe and Pamodi Bhagya are gaining sensible agrifood and entrepreneurial expertise by means of FAO’s Entrepreneurial College Backyard programme, applied with DFAT help, planting the seeds for a brand new technology of assured younger girls farmers and agripreneurs.
Whereas these testimonies are heartening, it will be unwise to mistake vital successes for systemic change. Throughout Sri Lanka’s agriculture and plantation sectors, constraints stay cussed and acquainted:
- Entry gaps persist in land tenure and management over productive belongings, limiting girls’s bargaining energy and eligibility for formal finance.
- Extension and coaching don’t constantly attain girls in ways in which match their time constraints, mobility realities, and studying wants—particularly in technical areas similar to mechanization, climate-resilient practices, and agribusiness expertise.
- Market participation is usually formed by unequal energy dynamics, leaving many ladies concentrated in lower-return segments of worth chains, with restricted voice over pricing, contracts, and collective advertising.
- Within the plantation economic system, girls’s labour stays indispensable, but the pathways to expertise upgrading, management, and higher-value roles are nonetheless too slim relative to their contribution.
And that is the place 2026 ought to encourage a extra sincere dialog about what “inclusion” actually means.
For years, programmes have rightly inspired girls’s illustration: extra committee members, extra individuals, extra “seats on the desk.” That’s progress, and it issues. However a seat on the desk can turn out to be symbolic if it doesn’t include the authority to form what’s on the menu.
A sensible, forward-looking agenda for 2026 may subsequently give attention to 4 areas the place Sri Lanka can construct on progress and speed up change.
First, make extension and expertise programmes actually accessible and related to girls farmers. This implies scheduling that respects care duties; coaching delivered near communities; better use of girls trainers and peer studying; and content material that features equipment operation, post-harvest dealing with, high quality assurance, digital instruments, enterprise planning, and local weather companies.
Second, develop girls’s entry to finance and markets with risk-reducing pathways. Group-based financing, financial savings and credit score fashions, and focused ensures can ease collateral boundaries. Available on the market aspect, predictable procurement—the place possible—can create secure demand that helps girls plan manufacturing and make investments with confidence, constructing on classes from home-grown faculty feeding fashions.
Third, transfer from illustration to agenda-setting energy. Farmer organizations and producer teams shouldn’t solely recruit girls members, however reform governance so girls can meaningfully affect choices. That requires clear guidelines, rotating management, mentoring, negotiation coaching, and sensible enablers similar to transport, childcare hyperlinks, protected assembly environments in order that participation will not be penalized. It additionally requires allies: males who perceive that sharing energy will not be a loss, however a path to stronger establishments and higher outcomes.
Fourth, enhance gender-disaggregated information and accountability. Higher measurement will not be forms, it’s a software for equity and effectiveness. Monitoring who receives companies, credit score, coaching, and contracts can reveal gaps early and allow course correction. It additionally helps distinguish between participation as a metric and affect as an end result.
Sri Lanka’s story will not be one in every of absence; it’s one in every of important contribution and rising consideration, paired with the popularity that rather more stays to be finished to match girls’s duties with equal alternative and affect. The Worldwide 12 months of the Girl Farmer 2026 will help the nation take the following step. We have to flip appreciation into motion. Celebrating girls farmers is vital. Guaranteeing they haven’t solely a seat, but additionally the power to set the agenda, and to resolve what success ought to appear to be is the work that 2026 Worldwide 12 months of Ladies Farmers ought to assist us advance with renewed urgency and shared dedication.
