Most Indonesian millennials who grew up in the 1990s remember the sentence from their elementary Bahasa Indonesia textbook: “bapak pergi ke sawah, ibu masak di dapur.” In English, it is translated as “father goes to the field, mother stays home to cook.” Decades later, that sentence has quietly become a cultural script. The term bapak tani, the male farmer, remains the dominant image attached to Indonesian agriculture, celebrated in policy, portrayed in media, and assumed in market design. Ibu tani, the woman farmer, exists in the field but rarely in the narrative.

Across Indonesia’s agricultural landscape, women make up a significant share of the farming workforce, planting, harvesting, and processing, yet remain systematically excluded from the decisions, markets, and profits. As Prof. Anna Fatchiya of IPB University’s Faculty of Human Ecology has noted, women farmers carry significant roles in the agrifood system, yet receive disproportionately little recognition for it. They are present in the field, but absent from the value chain. This is not a cultural accident. It is a structural one, and no agritech platform is designed to fix the root cause of this gender problem.

The numbers make this concrete. Data from Syngenta Indonesia reveals that 37.8 per cent of Indonesian farmers are women, yet only 13.61 per cent hold formal rights over the land they work. In Jambi province, Sumatra, women farmers earn approximately US$3.53 per day compared to US$6.48 for their male counterparts, for the same work and on the same schedule. According to Widyani (2023) of Universitas Negeri Makassar, these disparities are sustained by deep-rooted patriarchal norms, belief systems inherited from the past that continue to structure present agricultural relations.

The problem is not the app — it is the system behind it

In rural Indonesia, patriarchal structures are active and embedded in how agricultural markets function. Male farmers are treated as the default market actors; mostly, they negotiate with middlemen, secure supplier relationships, and are recognised as the primary decision makers. Female farmers, meanwhile, are limited to planting and harvesting, while domestic responsibilities such as cooking and taking care of the family fill the rest of their hours.

This is not a matter of attitude or culture. It is how informal market rules have been built. Middlemen seek male farmers because male farmers are considered the leaders. Price information circulates through networks that women are excluded from. Nobody wrote these rules down. They did not need to. The norms came first, and the market followed.

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Land ownership in rural Indonesia is dominated by men, aligned with data from FAO (2018) that globally, less than 15 per cent of women own agricultural land. Further, access to agricultural credit typically requires proof of land rights. Women farmers without formal legal assets cannot participate in programs such as Kredit Usaha Rakyat (KUR) arranged by national banks and the government in Indonesia. 

This is where the gaps in agritech become visible. Agritech ventures enter the market with two goals:

• To grow, through user acquisition, partnerships, and revenue, and 
• To solve problems in the agricultural supply chain. 

Both goals are reasonable. But both are designed to operate within the current system, not to challenge it. When the existing system already excludes women farmers at the level of norms, informal rules, and formal structures, a platform that adapts to that system will digitise the exclusion that was already there.

Technology is not the problem. The foundation it is built on is.

What fixing the system actually looks like 

Fixing the market system does not start with building a better app or AI tech. It starts with changing who gets to participate in the market. By design, this is where civil society organisations (CSOs) play a role. 

CSOs are often treated as service delivery channels, organisations that distribute aid, run training programs, and report impact numbers. But in agricultural market systems, they are more important than that. They operate inside communities, build trust over years, and are positioned to shift the informal rules that formal institutions and tech platforms cannot do.

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Perempuan Sumatera Mampu (PERMAMPU) and Pemberdayaan Perempuan Kepala Keluarga (PEKKA) are two examples of CSOs that aim to enhance women’s economic independence and leadership, aligned with the needs of women farmers in Indonesia to have access to a business and market environment. 

However, to strengthen and widen the impact of CSOs, there must be clear collaboration between stakeholders, such as:

• Collaboration with agritech startups to make women farmers become reliable producers. 
• Collaboration with local authorities to enable them to connect with national banks in order to access credit for enterprises such as KUR. 
• Collaboration with universities to access knowledge transfer from academia and researchers. 

These efforts will not only produce results on paper alone, but also revolutionise the system to put women farmers as reliable producers and partners. 

For founders and investors in Southeast Asian agriculture, the question is no longer whether women farmers are underserved. The real question is whether the ecosystem is willing to measure success by equal opportunities, not just equal access. 

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