Barriers to Productivity and Income for Women Producers

Women producers – farmers, small enterprise owners, artisans, and market traders – make up a massive share of the workforce in developing economies. According to the FAO, women comprise about 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, contributing 60 to 80 percent of total farm and non-farm tasks across much of the Global South. Yet despite this enormous contribution, women consistently earn less, produce less per unit of input, and remain confined to the lower rungs of value chains. This is not because women work less hard or are less capable. The gap is structural. Three interconnected barriers – limited market and capital access, skill and technology deficits, and exploitation by middlemen – form the core of the problem. Understanding each one is the first step toward dismantling them.

Market and capital constraints 🔗

Access to markets and finance is arguably the most foundational barrier women producers face. Without capital to invest in better inputs, and without reliable routes to markets that pay fair prices, productivity improvements become nearly impossible to sustain.

The capital gap 🔗

The numbers here are stark. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, women receive less than 10% of available agricultural credit, which limits their ability to purchase quality seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation equipment. This is not because women are a higher credit risk. Research analyzing World Bank Enterprise Survey data from 61 countries shows that women-led firms actually demonstrate 15% higher average returns on capital compared to male-led counterparts, yet they consistently receive lower loan amounts. The disparity is driven by implicit biases among loan officers, additional collateral requirements applied unevenly, and social norms that limit women’s ownership of assets like land, which is typically required for formal credit.

The total micro, small, or medium enterprise finance gap for women is estimated at $1.7 trillion globally. Consider Violeta Pacheco Mejía, a clothing entrepreneur in Lima, Peru, who had been running a successful business for nearly two decades – yet every investment she made, from buying a building to acquiring raw materials, was financed through a loan her husband received from the bank. She simply could not access credit in her own name. This is not an unusual story. It is the norm in many parts of the world, particularly where formal identification, land titles, and social capital are unequally distributed between men and women.

Limited market access 🔗

Structural barriers including gender discrimination, limited mobility, unequal access to assets, and restricted access to information and networks confine many women to local and informal markets with little growth potential. Women-led firms are largely absent from formal supply chains. Some estimates indicate that women-led firms earn less than 2% of purchases made by large corporations and governments, and a significant share of large corporations do not even collect sex-disaggregated procurement data, which is the first step toward supplier diversity programs.

The problem compounds when demand itself is lacking. Research in Ghana found that when access to product markets is the binding constraint for women entrepreneurs, interventions focused purely on skills or capital may not be effective on their own. What matters is connecting women to new markets – through digital channels, direct buyer relationships, or export opportunities. Without this, production improvements have nowhere to go.

Skill and technology gaps 🔗

Even when capital and market access can be improved, a stubborn gap in skills and technology continues to hold women producers back. This is not simply about literacy or education levels – it runs much deeper into how agricultural technologies and training programs are designed, distributed, and made accessible.

The productivity cost of being excluded from technology 🔗

FAO research indicates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20-30%, raising total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5-4%. Recent findings also indicate a 24% gap in land productivity between farms of the same size managed by women versus men – a gap that can largely be traced back to unequal access to information, training, and tools rather than any difference in effort or ability.

Agricultural technologies – from crop varieties and machinery to mobile apps and decision-support tools – are most often designed with male farmers in mind. Available technologies frequently fail to meet the specific needs of women producers, and women face multiple gender-based barriers to accessing those technologies that do exist. Mechanization, for instance, is typically designed for tasks dominated by men, such as plowing and harvesting. Tasks women commonly perform – post-harvest processing, grading, sorting – are either not mechanized or mechanized tools are too heavy or expensive for women to use.

Extension services and training reach 🔗

Access to agricultural extension and training is a critical pathway for improving productivity, yet women are systematically underrepresented. A study in Ethiopia found that 14% of women reported limited or no access to agricultural information, compared to just 2.5% of men. In the same country, women with access to agricultural information reported greater involvement in farming, better adoption of best practices, and more decision-making power over income. The connection between information access and empowerment is direct.

Only 5% of women farmers currently receive agricultural training. Mobility constraints play a significant role here – women are less able to travel to training sessions due to caregiving responsibilities and social norms restricting movement. Digital tools have enormous potential to bridge this gap, but only when the digital divide is also addressed. Studies in Ghana highlight that many women cannot read or write, making it difficult to independently use phones or digital tools, and societal norms add another layer of restriction to their use of technology.

There are promising models for change. In Mali, training women as agricultural service providers for a rice management app resulted in over 20,000 women and youth farmers adopting new technologies, contributing to a rice yield increase of 1 tonne per hectare on women’s fields. The key was using a gender-responsive design – acknowledging that women farmers often cannot directly access male extension agents due to cultural norms, so training women intermediaries made the information reachable. Technology works when it is built for the people it is meant to serve.

Exploitation by middlemen 🔗

Even when women producers manage to grow more and improve their output, a third barrier erodes their gains at the point of sale: exploitation by intermediaries. Middlemen – traders and brokers who position themselves between producers and final buyers – are a feature of most agricultural supply chains. In themselves they are not the problem. The problem is the power asymmetry that allows them to systematically undercut women producers who lack alternatives.

How the exploitation works 🔗

Studies indicate that middlemen underpay rural women farmers by 30-50% below market value, keeping them economically vulnerable. Women lacking direct access to markets – due to mobility constraints, limited information, social restrictions, or absence of transport – have little choice but to sell to whoever comes to them. Intermediaries exploit this captivity. They buy at throwaway prices and resell at significantly higher rates, capturing the bulk of final market value.

A striking example comes from Bihar, India, where women growing lychee – a notoriously perishable fruit – were accustomed to leasing their orchards to middlemen who would harvest, sell, and then pay the farmers a verbally agreed sum, often paying only a fraction of even that promised amount. The women had no leverage. They could not get the fruit to distant markets themselves before it perished, so they depended entirely on the broker’s goodwill.

This dynamic is not unique to agriculture. Exploitation of women, lack of market information, less decision-making power, lack of land-ownership rights, and the dominance of men in cooperative structures are interconnected barriers that make it difficult for women to negotiate better terms or bypass intermediaries altogether. In every value chain, once a certain level of profitability is reached, the likelihood of “male takeover” is high – meaning women risk being pushed out of the segments they developed as those segments become lucrative.

Structural reinforcement of the problem 🔗

Barriers to women’s economic empowerment are far-ranging, including gender-related laws, violence and harassment, and limited access to land, technology, credit, and social and business networks – and they all intersect to make middleman dependence harder to break. When women cannot own land, they cannot use it as collateral for credit. Without credit, they cannot invest in storage or transport to hold their goods or get them to better markets. Without market access, they remain tied to whoever will come to buy from them. The cycle is self-reinforcing.

When value chain interventions fail to account for gender dynamics, gender disparities in workloads and income tend to increase, not decrease. Development programs that focus only on production-side improvements without addressing who controls the sale and pricing of output can inadvertently benefit male intermediaries more than the women whose labor produced the goods in the first place.

What the convergence of these barriers means 🔗

These three barriers do not operate independently. They function as a system. Limited capital means women cannot invest in better technology or higher-quality inputs. Without technology or training, their output quality may not meet the standards required by formal buyers. And without direct access to better markets, they remain dependent on intermediaries who capture the value their labor generated. Research modeling the macroeconomic implications of barriers to female entrepreneurship in India found that removing all excess barriers faced by women producers would increase aggregate productivity by nearly 10% and welfare by nearly 20%. This is not a marginal issue. It is a central question of economic efficiency and equity.

Effective interventions need to work across all three fronts simultaneously. Research shows that when a lack of demand for products is a binding constraint, skills and capital interventions alone may not be effective – market access has to come alongside them. And market access interventions will not reach their potential if women lack the capital, skills, or bargaining power to participate in those markets on equitable terms. Gender gaps are pervasive in the critical skills and networks needed to run a successful business, and programs that address only one dimension tend to produce modest, short-lived gains. The goal is an integrated approach – one that sees women producers not as beneficiaries of charity, but as economic actors being held back by correctable structural constraints.

What do you think? Given that middlemen exploitation, capital gaps, and technology exclusion all reinforce each other – which of these barriers do you believe needs to be addressed first to break the cycle for women producers in low-income contexts? And do you think technology-driven solutions, such as digital marketplaces and mobile banking, can realistically reach the most marginalized women producers, or do deeper structural changes need to come first?

References

1. https://www.irri.org/news-and-events/news/bridging-gender-divide-agriculture-through-digital-tools
2. https://au.int/en/pressreleases/20250324/we-must-do-more-break-barriers-rural-women-farmers-and-address-deeply-rooted
3. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/gender-bias-access-finance-and-implications-capital-misallocation
4. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/women-entrepreneurs-finance-banking/
5. https://www.fundsforngos.org/all-proposals/a-sample-grant-proposal-on-market-linkages-for-women-led-and-community-based-enterprises/
6. https://repec.iza.org/dp16950.pdf
7. https://www.techherfrica.org/elevating-women-farmers-closing-the-gender-gap-in-agriculture-through-digital-tools/
8. https://globalagriculturalproductivity.org/2023-gap-report/partner-stories/addressing-the-gender-gaps-in-agriculture-to-improve-productivity/
9. https://unctad.org/publication/gender-impact-technological-upgrading-agriculture
10. https://blog.plantwise.org/2024/04/11/bridging-the-gender-digital-divide-in-ghana/
11. https://gender.cgiar.org/news/six-agricultural-technologies-cgiar-researchers-have-designed-work-women
12. https://farmingfirst.org/campaigns/rural-women/the-gender-gap/
13. https://gender.cgiar.org/news/agricultural-value-chain-interventions-can-improve-womens-incomes-assets-holdings-productivity
14. https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw56/egm/Farnworth-EP-1-EGM-RW-Sep-2011.pdf
15. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/gender-norms-and-womens-economic-empowerment-low-income-countries-what-we-learned-reviewing-evidence
16. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/aggregate-implications-barriers-female-entrepreneurship
17. https://we-fi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/We-Fi-Evidence-Paper-2025.pdf