The Backbone of Couffo's Food System
In the villages and communes of Couffo Department, the work of feeding families and communities falls predominantly on women. Women make up the majority of smallholder farmers across the region, cultivating cassava, maize, beans, and vegetables on small plots while simultaneously managing households, raising children, and participating in local trade networks.
Their labour is largely invisible in official economic statistics, yet it underpins food security across the department. Understanding their lives and challenges is essential to understanding Couffo itself.
Cassava: The Crop That Sustains
Cassava (Manihot esculenta) is the most important food crop in Couffo. It is hardy, drought-tolerant, and can be stored in the ground for months — properties that make it a critical food security crop in a region subject to rainfall variability. Women are the primary cultivators, harvesters, and processors of cassava, transforming it into gari (fermented, dried cassava granules), tapioca, and lafun (cassava flour) — staple foods consumed daily throughout southern Benin.
The Processing Journey
Processing cassava is labour-intensive work. After harvesting, roots must be:
- Peeled and washed in local waterways
- Grated — increasingly by small mechanical graters, though hand-grating remains common in remote villages
- Fermented for one to three days to reduce natural toxins
- Pressed and dried in the sun
- Roasted over fire to produce gari
This entire process, from harvest to sale, is managed primarily by women, often working in cooperative groups that share labour and equipment.
Cooperative Networks: Strength in Numbers
Across Couffo's communes, women's farming and processing cooperatives play a vital role. These groups allow members to pool resources to purchase equipment such as mechanical graters and presses, share transport costs to reach weekly markets, negotiate better prices with traders collectively, and support one another through periods of illness or family difficulty.
Cooperatives also serve as informal credit systems — members contribute small regular sums to a communal fund (tontine) that is disbursed to members on a rotating basis, providing working capital that formal banking systems have rarely extended to rural women in the region.
Challenges Faced
Despite their central role, women farmers in Couffo face structural disadvantages that limit their productivity and income:
- Land access: Customary land tenure systems often restrict women's formal ownership of farmland, limiting their ability to invest in long-term soil improvements.
- Limited access to inputs: Quality seeds, fertilisers, and tools are often unaffordable or difficult to source in rural areas.
- Market volatility: Cassava and gari prices fluctuate significantly with seasonal supply, making income unpredictable.
- Time poverty: The dual burden of farm work and domestic responsibilities leaves little time for skills development or market networking.
Resilience and Innovation
What is striking about the women farmers of Couffo is not only the challenges they navigate but the creativity with which they do so. New drying techniques reduce post-harvest losses. Cooperative buying arrangements lower input costs. Younger women are using mobile phones to track market prices in Cotonou and Lokossa before deciding when and where to sell.
Their stories are not simply stories of hardship — they are stories of ingenuity, solidarity, and the quiet determination that sustains communities across one of Benin's most resilient regions.