| Sumario: | Women have played a significant role in traditional agricultural production technology in African societies. Because women's contribution was so central in both the agricultural division of labor and its reproduction, traditional structures of resource allocation have provided them access to the basic factors of production in agriculture. Despite the fact that they remained socially subordinate to men, they participated in resource control, decisionmaking, and production. However in programs for improvement of agricultural technologies, women are seldom recipients of the benefits, although they no doubt are capable of using them. In the cases cited in the literature where women either could not obtain the new technology or were adversely affected by it, underlying social, cultural, and economic conditions were primarily responsible. This was usually compounded by insensitivity in program design and implementation.
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