Farmers groups and extension impact: Exploring female farmer’s roles, levels of participation and livelihood benefits within milk bulking groups of Dowa and Dedza districts in Malawi

Women play a significant and crucial role in agriculture by providing labour in crop production, and livestock management that provide household food and income when small surpluses are sold. There is need therefore for equipping and empowering female farmers so that they can have diversified and sustainable livelihood support options. Empowerment entails farmers making their own decisions rather than adopting recommendations. The results of empowerment may lead to increased female representation in farmer groups such as milk bulking groups (MBGs) and increased levels of participation. The objective of this study was to assess the roles of female farmers and their participation in MBGs and how these have led to their empowerment and more sustainable livelihoods. The study was conducted in three MBGs that were purposively sampled from central Malawi districts. Data were collected through key informant interviews and focus group discussions and analysed using NVivo 11 software. The findings show that female farmers had a number of roles within the MBGs and key among these was that of executive leadership, designation as lead armers and bare membership. These roles were related to the different levels of namely authorised, descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation. This also led to their empowerment in that they were able to train their fellows in various aspects of agricultural production and acquisition of assets such as dairy animals, goats, pigs and chickens. This effort to increase access to sources of income is a critical step towards empowerment.