 or a good morning, depending on where you live. First of all, I would like to thank IRI and the IRI communication team for giving me this opportunity to talk about the work we are doing and the work we do related to gender. For the next 5 to 10 minutes, I will also discuss the topic of shared resources in rice farming and how women benefit from it. So this is what I will talk about for the next 5 to 10 minutes. Let me first start with introducing myself. I'm Peter Utsarth. I work for the social science division of IRI and most of the time or most of my work is for the KORIGAP project. Now, the KORIGAP project is a project funded by the Swiss Development Cooperation and this project focuses on irrigated rice production zones. We work in 6 countries, including Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and China. I think I've named them all. So the work we do is we do adaptive research in those countries. We work together with farmers in the field to improve their practices in rice farming. We focus, for example, on one important thing we do is try to reduce yield caps while reducing environmental footprint. Now, one part of this project or what we also hope to do is improve gender equity and the livelihoods of the women farmers in the areas where we work. Now, something I think quite important if you want to improve something is to know where we're at right now. To understand the situation, rural women face, women in rice farming face and to look at the barriers they have to task division and the problems they face. So the approach we took to look at this is we did focus group discussions with several women groups in the countries where we work, especially for countries, Thailand, Philippines, Myanmar and Indonesia. So we did focus group discussions in all these different countries and our findings were, I think, quite surprising and they were not really in line with the general discussion about gender in agriculture. So we had a bit of different findings from research that mostly comes from, for example, Africa or South Asia, where a lot of the gender research is currently being done. So first of all, what we see is that we have quite a strong gender equity on a household level. For example, income from husband and wife is pulled as family income and it's in so many cases that we looked at in most cases actually is the women who control this income and it doesn't matter how much they contribute to the income they will still have, they will still decide what happens with the income, how much is spent on education, rice farming whatsoever. So it's the women who control this. If we look at resources owned by a family, we see that most of the resources are owned together. When we ask this question, for example, in Indonesia, women find it very weird to ask this question, who owns what. It's most of the things when they're married or living together is owned by the family. If we look at rice farming itself, we see that rice farming really is a family work. So husband and wife work together in the field. It's not that one decides everything, no, they work together in the field and they decide also together. Sometimes it's the case that, for example, the man takes more a leading role then he will have also something more to say. But still most women we talked to felt that they had a voice in decision making and if they had concerns, those concerns would be raised. So on that household level, we see a very strong equity in the four countries where we collected our data. If we now look at the community level, we see a bit of a different story. So on the community level, we see a very strong empowerment in Thailand and also in the Philippines. So women had strong voice in the community. They had access to information, access to extension services and training. They were leading farmer groups, they were leading village groups who were very powerful in that sense. While in Indonesia and Myanmar, women were absolutely not active and they didn't have any voice on a community level decision making. Now this also has implications for agriculture and for their agriculture practices and rice farming. For example, in Indonesia, a lot of community decisions influence household decisions. So for example, variety selection is made on the community level. So on the household level, they cannot discuss this anymore. The man, the state is on the community level in the areas where we work and this rule also holds true for the household level. So that's where women have less of a voice. Also when it comes to access to information, extension services, we see that women have very quite limited access. This mostly goes to the men while both men, husband and wife are working together in the fields. So on that sense, improvements are very much possible. So if we now, we also have quite some other results, but if we look at those two main results we had from our focus group discussions, we also looked at what are the implications for a project, for a core care project. And what we see is that, or what we really focus on if we provide information or extension that we are very inclusive, that we focus on both men and women and that we make sure that if our information, we make sure that our information is targeted to both groups. If we need to therefore adapt the information we give about farming practices, we will do this and we'll make sure that the women get the information or the information in the way that they prefer most. But we also will keep including men in what we do. So I think another consequence or another important finding from looking at gender equity in rice farming is that even though if we focus on the crop and we focus on male farmers, we still benefit the wives because husband and wife benefit from the same income. They benefit from the whole family income. So even though if men attended trainings, we still hope and we still see and hear that the women are benefiting from what we do, from those shared resources, that shared income. Now I think this is maybe not as big of an eye catching story or an exciting story as some of the other work we do with less privileged women, with people with much more problems. We work in irrigated rice zones, which are mostly a bit better off than the really distinct areas. But it's still quite important research and it still provides a different way of looking at gender equity. So for example, if we compare this to Africa, where we have very separate demarcated male and female plots, incomes and crops, we see that rice farming in Southeast Asia is much more a combined effort and it's much more a family effort. If we compare this then to South Asia, where there's a really strong male dominance on household level, we see again that here is a different equity at play at the household level. So we have some different findings here. Now, if we therefore focus on improving gender equity, we should be aware of these things. And I think it's very important that we understand what's going on in the local situation and that we try to adapt or adjust what we do to the local situation. So therefore, I think it's very necessary that we look at the barriers women face on the ground, in the field and that we adapt to the local situation. So with this, I would like to say thank you very much for listening. I wish you a very happy International Women's Day and thank you very much.