 Two years after it was started, the program was abruptly ended because, according to the TPLF, teaching women how to plough served to increase their already burdensome responsibilities; in addition, it was argued that ploughing was too heavy for women.As a result, in Zana, which was one of the first woredas where this program was introduced, no women were ploughing in 1993.If the official reasons for discontinuing the ploughing program can be discounted then the assumption must be that the TPLF feared that by encouraging women to plough it was causing offence by challenging the core religious and social beliefs about women in rural Tigrayan society.