Tools in the making: the co-construction of gender, crops, and crop breeding in African agriculture

Abstract Crop breeding for development has a relatively long tradition of including the perspectives of women and men farmers. However, the lack of adoption and development impacts of improved crop varieties, particularly in African countries, has led to a growing interest in novel ways of making crop breeding more responsive to the needs, preferences, and demands of different social groups of women and men in agriculture. However, many questions remain about how best to render crop breeding gender-responsive, in terms of both methodological and institutional innovations. In this paper, I investigate how gender-responsive crop breeding is practiced and negotiated, and with what effects, through an ethnographic case study of the Gender + Tools: a set of gender-responsive decision-support tools developed by the CGIAR Gender and Breeding Initiative. Using perspectives from feminist technoscience studies, I explore how the Gender + Tools take on several performative roles through which gender, crops, and crop breeding become co-constructed: as a diagnostic and screening tool, a communication and marketing tool, and a management tool. The paper provides insights that can help support and improve gender-responsive and transformative crop breeding, while also expanding the scope of feminist technoscience studies to the underexplored topic of development-oriented crop breeding in Africa.