 Helen's Daughters, an entity committed to lending support to rural women in agriculture, on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding with Export St. Lucia. Hermadi Mark has details on the initiative. Helen's Daughters, an organisation dedicated to providing support to rural women in agriculture, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Export St. Lucia. The organisation aids its members with the use of adaptive agricultural techniques, capacity-building and improved market access. Through the signing of this agreement, Helen's Daughters hopes to continue to empower women and enable them to play a more prominent role in the value chain of the agricultural sector. CEO of Helen's Daughters, Kiflyn Karoo, believes this is the start of a new era for rural women in agriculture. As a society, we often do not realise the integral role that women play from throughout the value chain, from reproduction to marketing to processing. And as a result of our stereotypes, women have been cut out of a lot of opportunities in the agricultural sector, particularly in training, receiving finance and capacity development. And agriculture from yesterday to even today still remains an important productive sector of ours. I mean, it employs about 21% of persons in the labour force, but when we break it down, 9% of that is women, whereas 12% of that is men. And when we speak of actually skilled labour, it's 2% of women being skilled workers, whereas there's only about 8% of men being skilled, which really drives down on this demonstration that at the end of the day, there's a lot of need for investment and support in upskilling the labour force overall, particularly in the agricultural sector, but definitely in also focusing on the most marginalised communities, such as women and youth. The signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the two entities on June 16, 2021, enables Export St Lucia to provide technical support to Helen's daughters and its members. CEO of Export St Lucia, Sunita Daniels says they are committed to strengthening Helen's daughters in any capacity possible. One of the things we want to do with them is to really assist them with research, to help them with market access. There are a lot of things that they're doing that Export St Lucia can really bring some expertise to, and we're really, really looking forward to working with Helen's daughters. I'm sure it will be a very fulfilling partnership, and it's something we're so excited and we're really looking forward to seeing where it all leads. We really want to see more girls getting involved in agricultural activity, more teenage girls, more teenage women getting involved in agricultural activities. We want women to see agriculture as a very viable career that they can go into. And so with Helen's daughters, we're hoping to do that. Some projects to be derived from the new partnership include the creation of a seed bank to aid farmers in the diversification of produce and the development of a virtual course for persons looking to tap into export markets. From the Government Information Service, I'm Hermione Mark reporting.