Women’s leadership development through participation in community-based extension governance structures

Introduction

Women grow the food but men make the rules. This oversimplification captures a real pattern across much of rural sub-Saharan Africa, where women contribute an estimated 60 to 80% of agricultural labor yet hold fewer than 15% of leadership positions in community agricultural governance bodies [1,2] . The imbalance is not simply unfair; it has practical consequences. When women are absent from decision-making, extension services tend to reflect men's priorities, overlooking the crops, markets, and production challenges that women manage [3] . Community-based extension governance structures, including farmer committees, extension planning groups, and agricultural advisory boards, have expanded across Africa as part of decentralization and participatory development reforms [4] . These structures are intended to give farmers a voice in how extension services are designed and delivered. But bringing women into these structures as members is not the same as developing them as leaders. Research from Kenya and Ghana has shown that women on agricultural committees are often silent participants who attend meetings but don't speak, vote, or hold officer positions [5,6] . A smaller body of work suggests that when women do take on substantive committee roles, the experience can build transferable leadership skills. Agarwal [7] found that women who served as elected leaders in Indian forestry governance groups gained confidence and skills that carried over into other community institutions. Pandolfelli and colleagues [8] reported similar spillover effects from women's participation in water user associations in Ethiopia. But evidence from agricultural extension governance specifically remains limited, particularly in the Central and West African context. This research examined whether participation in community-based extension governance structures contributed to women's leadership development in Cameroon's Southwest Region. It assessed whether leadership capacity varied by duration of service and type of committee role, and whether extension governance participation generated spillover into leadership positions in other community bodies [9,10] .

Instrument development and validation

The Women's Leadership Capacity Index (WLCI) was developed specifically for this research because existing leadership scales were designed for corporate or urban settings and lacked relevance to rural African governance contexts. The instrument was constructed in three phases. First, 28 semi-structured interviews with women leaders in Cameroon's Southwest Region generated a pool of 62 candidate items reflecting locally recognized leadership attributes. Second, an expert panel of six researchers in www.extensionjournal.com gender studies and agricultural extension reviewed the items and reduced the pool to 40, organized into four subscales: decision-making confidence (10 items), public speaking ability (10 items), negotiation skills (10 items), and community influence (10 items). Each item was scored on a five-point Likert scale (0-4), yielding a total score of 0-160 subsequently converted to a 0-100 index. Third, the instrument was piloted with 34 women in two non-sampled communities, yielding a Cronbach's alpha of 0.87 for the full scale and subscale alphas ranging from 0.79 to 0.84 [11] .

Materials and Methods

Materials

The research covered 12 communities in Cameroon's Southwest Region, specifically in the Fako and Meme Divisions. Data collection took place between August 2022 and March 2023, coordinated from the School of Agriculture at the University of Buea. A total of 164 women currently serving on community-based extension governance committees were surveyed using complete enumeration of all women committee members within the selected communities. Participants ranged in age from 24 to 63 years and included women serving as chairpersons, vicechairpersons, secretaries, treasurers, mobilization officers, and general members. Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Buea Institutional Review Board (Protocol UB-IRB-2022-0196, July 2022). Informed consent was obtained from all participants [12] .

Methods

A cross-sectional survey design was used. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews using the validated WLCI alongside a structured questionnaire covering sociodemographic characteristics, committee role type, duration of committee service, prior leadership experience, and whether committee participation had led to leadership roles in other community organizations. Committee service duration was categorized as less than one year (n=48), one to two years (n=52), and more than two years (n=64). Data were analyzed using SPSS version 28. Independent t-tests compared leadership scores by service duration, one-way ANOVA examined differences across role types, and chisquare tests assessed associations between committee role and spillover leadership. Significance was set at p<0.05 [13] .

Legal and regulatory framework

Cameroon's 2005 Decentralization Law mandated the transfer of agricultural extension coordination to local councils, creating opportunities for community participation in extension governance. The 2012 National Gender Policy further required that at least 30% of members in public decision-making bodies be women. However, implementation of this quota at the community extension committee level has been uneven. A 2019 review by the Ministry of Agriculture found that only 41% of extension committees in the Southwest Region met the 30% threshold, and women held officer-level positions in fewer than 18% of committees [14] . This regulatory context shaped both the opportunities available to women and the barriers they faced in moving from membership to leadership within extension governance structures.

Results

Comprehensive interpretation

Leadership scores increased steadily with service duration, from 43.2 for newcomers to 71.8 for women with over two years of experience (Table 1). This 28.6-point gap was highly significant and suggests that committee participation builds leadership capacity over time rather than simply attracting women who already possess it. Table 2 reveals that role type matters: women holding defined functional roles (chairperson, secretary, treasurer) scored substantially higher than general members and were far more likely to take on leadership positions in other community bodies. The secretary role showed a particularly strong combination of high leadership scores (68.9) and high spillover (63.9%), likely because the responsibilities of record-keeping, correspondence, and reporting build transferable organizational skills.

Discussion

These findings support the argument that community-based extension governance structures can serve as practical training grounds for women's leadership, provided women hold substantive roles rather than nominal membership. The 28.6-point difference between newcomers and longerserving members parallels findings from Agarwal's [7] work on forestry committees in India, where leadership gains also accumulated with tenure. The critical distinction appears to be between active role-holding and passive attendance. The spillover effect, where 54.3% of respondents reported gaining leadership positions in non-extension community bodies, is the most policy-relevant finding. It suggests that www.extensionjournal.com investing in women's participation in extension committees generates returns beyond the agricultural sector. Women who learned to manage budgets as treasurers moved into savings group leadership. Those who developed public speaking skills as chairpersons were elected to local councils. This multiplier effect has been theorized in the empowerment literature [15,16] but rarely documented with data from agricultural extension governance specifically. The weak outcomes for general members (WLCI score of 38.4, spillover of just 18.8%) carry an important warning.

Simply adding women to committee rosters without assigning them meaningful responsibilities may satisfy quotas but doesn't develop leaders. The legal framework requiring 30% women's representation in Cameroon's committees is a necessary step, but the quality of participation matters more than the quantity [17,18] .

Limitations

The cross-sectional design cannot confirm whether committee participation caused leadership development or whether women with pre-existing leadership traits were more likely to join and persist in committees. No baseline leadership assessment was available for comparison. The research was limited to Cameroon's Southwest Region and may not generalize to regions with different gender norms or governance traditions. Self-reported spillover data may overstate the extent to which extension governance led to other leadership roles. Future research should use longitudinal designs with pre-and post-participation assessments to better establish the direction of the relationship.

Conclusion

This research found that women's participation in community-based extension governance structures was associated with measurable leadership development, particularly when women held defined functional roles and served for more than two years. Leadership scores were 28.6 points higher among long-serving members than newcomers, and over half of all respondents reported gaining leadership positions in community organizations beyond extension, including local councils, market committees, and school boards. The practical message for extension administrators is that governance structures already exist within most extension systems. Making them work for women's leadership requires deliberate attention to role assignment, ensuring women hold positions with real responsibilities rather than sitting as silent members. The regulatory push for numerical quotas is a start but not sufficient. What turns committee participation into leadership development is the combination of genuine responsibility, sustained engagement, and peer support from other women in governance roles. Extension systems that take this seriously can produce benefits that ripple outward from agriculture into broader community governance.

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