Know your men and women farmers: Ensuring host farmers in participatory trials represent heterogeneity within the target environment

Societal Impact Statement
Gender responsive and more socially inclusive breeding strategies are needed toensure new crop varieties, which offer greater yields in an increasingly variable cli-mate, meet the needs of a diverse range of smallholder farmers. Participatory varietalselection actively involves farmers in testing and selecting new varieties at the end ofthe breeding process. We evaluated the inclusivity of a participatory maize breedingprogram in Zimbabwe. Our analysis found that setting targets for women farmer par-ticipation ensured adequate representation, but participatory research should movebeyond simple targets and ensure the inclusion of different types of women and menfarmers.
Summary
• There is growing interest in participatory varietal selection and gender-responsivebreeding in research and development initiatives. On-farm testing is increasinglyused to ensure that new varieties perform within the target environments. How-ever, there are few established approaches for selecting host women and menfarmers who reflect the diversity of the overall target population of smallholderfarmers. This study sought to evaluate ex-post if recruited farmers within a partici-patory breeding network in Zimbabwe were representative of the surveyed popu-lation and pilot an approach to developing comprehensive farm typologies toensure more gender-responsive and socially inclusive breeding.
• A sample of over 2,000 randomly selected women and men farmers, includingthose hosting breeding trials, were surveyed. A typology was constructed to groupfarms with similar characteristics associated with household demographics, maizeproduction and resource endowments. This facilitated the subsample of trial-hosting farmers characteristics to be compared with the broader typology.
• The distribution of farm types selected by extension agents to host trials closelyreflected the distribution of farm types within the surveyed population. Two farmtypes associated with women household heads and three types associated withmen-headed households were identified, highlighting the heterogeneity withinthese groups. Other important factors of differentiation included farm assets, live-stock ownership and maize production features.
• Sampling strategies that explicitly incorporate agronomic and socio-economicdiversity within the target population should be used in the selection of hostwomen and men farmers for participatory research to ensure appropriate gender and social inclusion.