Women's Agricultural Technology Adoption and Credit Access Through Community Savings Groups: A Gender-Disaggregated Analysis in South Sudan

This article examines how women's agricultural technology adoption is shaped by credit access through Community Group Saving and Lending (CGSL) mechanisms in rural South Sudan. Drawing on a mixed-methods PhD study conducted from 2022 to 2025 in Eastern Equatoria, Jonglei and Lakes States, the paper re-analyses reported survey, interview and inferential evidence through a gender-disaggregated lens. The thesis survey produced 81 valid responses from 85 targeted respondents and recorded 17 qualitative interviews; women represented 31% of the valid survey sample, with marked variation across the three states. The analysis shows that CGSLs are perceived as important local financial institutions because they mobilise savings, provide credit, build capacity and reduce reliance on distant formal finance. At the same time, the gender composition of the sample points to the continued under-representation of women in observed agricultural finance spaces. Mean scores were high for the role of CGSLs as member-managed entities (4.64), scarcity of working capital (4.68), modern technology as capital intensive (4.30), and credit as a prerequisite for technology adoption (4.02). Chi-square tests showed significant associations between CGSL participation and agricultural productivity indicators (χ² = 15.92, p = 0.0001), while logistic regression indicated that access to credit significantly increased the likelihood of investing in modern agricultural technologies (β = 1.9459, p = 0.026). The article argues that CGSLs can support women's movement from subsistence farming to technology-enabled production, but only when group lending is deliberately redesigned to address women's constraints in membership visibility, leadership voice, asset ownership, seasonal liquidity, and repayment risk. The paper contributes a gender-responsive CGSL upgrading framework for South Sudan's post-conflict rural development context.