Rural Women are undervalued… at least on paper. While we are well aware that women contribute significantly to the rural agricultural sector, in the absence of proper farm record keeping and an established knowledge management system, the real value of activities and transactions undertaken by women within the agricultural sector remains largely “invisible”.  Further compounding the lack of recorded information, is the ambiguity in the definition of economic and non-economic worth and the negation of the invaluable contribution of especially rural women, who dominate the informal sector and the reproductive economy. The internalization of the concepts of equity and fairness is fundamental to the creation of a precision agricultural policy process. Against this background, the correlation between female gender work, forgone earning, subsistence agriculture, the informal sector and human security begs for in-depth analysis and transformation.

Unrecorded and unrecognized informal sector earnings are arguably the most significant portion of the full income of rural farm households and without this tangible information, it will be difficult to design policies and programmes that achieve the goal of supporting rural women farmers, boosting their resilience, and increasing their contribution to society. Other industries that clearly showcase the necessary data are getting the support and attention that they need. For example, the sectors with functioning knowledge management systems, such as tourism, manufacturing, and services, are highly regarded as the drivers of the national economy.

To remedy this, one of the first steps to safeguarding the human security of rural women is creating an agriculture policy environment - with the active inputs of farmers - that supports the development and implementation of strategies geared towards the assurance of economic security, food security and environmental security. However, the policy environment speaks to not only the content of the policy, but the policy context, which can best be described as a complex web of tacit knowledge and undocumented transactions throughout agriculture value chain. Regrettably, this ‘unspoken’ knowledge is non-formalized and exists only in the human mind. Therefore, due to the dearth of explicit, sharable knowledge, agricultural policies tend to underrate the worth of unpaid work, the informal sector, and the reproductive economy. Consequently, most agricultural policies fail to achieve the intended outcomes, because they are largely abstract rather than evidence based.