Eswatini's Food Security Plan Has a Structural Flaw: It Has Long Excluded the Majority of Its Farmers

Eswatini's agricultural extension system was designed around a particular farmer: male, with formal land title, with recognised household authority, and available during the hours when training sessions were scheduled. The majority of people who actually farm in Eswatini do not fit this profile. Women plant, weed, and harvest across Swati homesteads, but without ownership of the land they cultivate, decision-making authority over its produce, or access to the extension services that governments have funded to improve agricultural outcomes.

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The International Trade Centre, operating through its She Trades initiative and in partnership with the European Union, the Government of Eswatini, and the Eswatini National Agricultural Union, has developed a gender-responsive agricultural services manual and accompanying video series. The toolkit is targeted at extension officers, cooperatives, farmer organisations, and agribusiness support institutions. Its aim is to help these bodies redesign how they deliver services — not simply to offer gender-awareness training, but to fundamentally restructure when, where, and how services are delivered to reach women and other underserved groups.

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Sydney Simelane, Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, has framed this directly. Achieving food self-sufficiency, he said, is impossible if 50 percent of the agricultural workforce faces systemic barriers to productivity. The logical corollary is that Eswatini has been pursuing food security goals while systematically constraining the productivity of the majority of its farmers. That is not a gap at the margins. It is a structural contradiction at the core of agricultural policy.

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The specific barriers the toolkit addresses include training sessions scheduled during times women are in the fields or responsible for household and caregiving duties, land ownership structures that exclude women from formal inputs and credit, and decision-making frameworks that route agricultural resources through male household heads. Tammy Dlamini, CEO of the Eswatini National Agricultural Union, describes the intervention not as instruction but as facilitated conversation — helping families and communities rethink how resources are allocated internally, rather than imposing external prescriptions.

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Early evidence from pilot communities suggests that this approach is producing results: stronger household collaboration, more inclusive decision-making processes, and increased participation of women farmers in markets. The story of Thembisile Mafu, a young woman from the Shiselweni region who expanded from a backyard garden to farming three hectares and won a regional agribusiness award, illustrates what becomes possible when institutional support reaches women who were previously outside the extension system's reach.

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The initiative is framed within a 50-year milestone of EU-Eswatini cooperation, and as part of a programme called Promoting Growth Through Competitive Alliances. The long-term ambition is nationwide reach. But nationwide reach for a gender-responsive model requires something harder than a new manual: it requires the extension system itself to change how it recruits officers, sets schedules, measures success, and allocates resources. Toolkits inform practice. Institutions define it.

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The structural test for this intervention is whether the gender-responsive model it promotes can survive the transition from pilot to system — whether it can embed itself into routine government agricultural services, or whether it remains a project-funded intervention that exists only as long as EU or ITC programming sustains it.