Inter-temporal and Spatial Price Dispersion Patterns and the Well-Being of Maize Producers in Southern Tanzania

We revisit a methodology to gauge the short-term effect of price changes on smallholder farmer's welfare that is popular amongst policy makers and academia. Realising that farmers face substantial seasonal price volatility over the course of an agricultural year, we pay particular attention to the timing of sales and purchases. In addition we depart from the implicit assumption that all farmers scattered across rural areas face the same prices when interacting with markets. Using maize marketing during the 2007–2008 agricultural season in a sample of smallholders in Tanzania as an illustration, we find that especially poor farmers face greater losses than what a standard analysis would suggest. We also relate our methodology to factors that are likely to affect potential benefits or costs from inter-temporal and spatial price dispersion, such as means of transport, access to price information and credit

“We’re in this together”: Changing intra-household decision making for more cooperative smallholder farming

Conceptualising smallholder farming households as collective action institutions, that make interrelated decisions about investment, resource use and allocation in a common household farm, may contribute to understanding widely observed uncooperative outcomes, such as yield gaps, gender gaps in productivity, suboptimal or Pareto inefficient sustainable intensification and climate change adaptation. We examine the relation between participatory intra-household decision making – as a set of ‘rules of the game’ that reduces information and bargaining power asymmetries – and cooperative, i.e. more efficient, sustainable and equitable, outcomes in smallholder coffee farming households in Uganda. We find experimental evidence that participatory decision making is positively related to investments in the common household farm. Consumption behaviour however is not fairer nor more sustainable. Participatory decision making is associated with more cooperative actual outcomes such as greater investment in sustainable intensification, consideration of women’s interests, fairer reproductive intra-household labour division, more balanced control over cash crop income and improved livelihoods

Making spouses cooperate in rural Ugandan households Experimental evidence of distributional treatment effects

This study investigates the impact of participatory household decision-making, introduced through a randomly encouraged intensive coaching package and less intensive couple seminars, in agricultural households in Uganda on intrahousehold cooperation and sharing behaviour measured in a lab-in-the-field experiment. The effects on the likelihood of playing the most cooperative strategies in two sequential voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) games and on average fractions contributed by couples, husbands and wives are limited and not clear-cut. Allowing a selection of couples to communicate before the second VCM game did not reinforce treatment effects even if they mimicked the treatment. The same applies for the impact on sharing behaviour in dictator games simultaneously played by husband and wife, following either the second VCM game with or without communication. There are however distributional treatment effects. The coaching made husbands and wives who are already cooperative more cooperative in the second VCM game and more generous in the sharing game specifically when communication is allowed. The couple seminars had similar effects among husbands. At the lower end of the distribution, the coaching and couple seminars negatively affected husbands and wives contributed shares in the second VCM game with communication; and wives offers in the subsequent sharing game. Acknowledgement : This project has received funding from the European Union s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 702964. The project received funding from the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung and from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Uganda research station, as well. We would like to thank Dr. Ben D'Exelle, Dr. Arjan Verschoor and Dr. Bereket Kebede for valuable advice for the design of the lab-in-the-field experiments

Impact of intrahousehold cooperation on household welfare and household public goods provision

The contribution of this article is providing evidence of the impact of intrahousehold cooperation on household welfare and household public goods provision in agricultural households in East Africa. While one of the main empirical challenges is that intrahousehold cooperation and household welfare are likely to be endogenous, we make use of the random encouragement for an intervention intended to stimulate intrahousehold cooperation to estimate the effect on household welfare and household public goods provision that is mediated through cooperation. The random encouragement fulfils the conditions to be used as an instrument to estimate the causal effect of the otherwise potentially endogenous treatment variable cooperation. We demonstrate that improved cooperation, as measured by jointly controlling a substantial share of the coffee income and livestock, joint decision-making over cash crops and adoption of sustainable intensification practices, and the joint management of the main household food and cash crops, has substantial positive effects on household income per capita and on the likelihood of household food security. The likelihood of investing in agricultural production, an important public good in these households, is greatly increased by improved cooperation as well

INTRACOF - The impact of intra household decision making on the sustainability, efficiency and equitability of household farming in sub-Saharan Africa.

This data was collected in the framework of the MSCA-IF-2015-EF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship project with the acronym INTRACOF. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 702964. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/200274/factsheet/en This research project assessed the extent to which more participatory intrahousehold decision-making about production and resource allocation contributes to more sustainable, efficient and equitable household farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa, more specifically smallholder coffee farming systems in central Uganda (Masaka-Kalungu and Mubende) and south-west Tanzania (Mbeya). An intervention in which spouses in household are intensely coached in participatory decision-making about production, resource allocation and income expenditure was randomly encouraged among Ugandan and Tanzanian smallholder coffee farming households. A lab-in-the-field experiment was conducted at endline which permits to appraise if provision and appropriation behaviour by spouses in households who were coached in, respectively made aware about, participatory intrahousehold decision-making is more cooperative, than in control households. The impact of participatory intrahousehold-decision making on the sustainability, efficiency and equitability of the outcomes from provision and appropriation behaviour in household farming systems can be studied with using the baseline and endline individual survey data collected among spouses in treatment and control households. The intervention, implemented by the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS) had two stages (https://www.hrnstiftung.org/gender/). In an initial stage, awareness raising couple seminars were organised. In the couple seminars, which take three to four hours, the HRNS gender officer guides couples through a self-assessment of the current division of roles, responsibilities, decision-making power and control over resources in their household. In a next stage of the intervention, a selection of couples who participated in the couple seminars goes through a package of activities during which the couples are intensively coached on how to implement participatory intrahousehold decision-making. A first activity is a one-day workshop for couples focused on putting participatory planning and decision making into practice. Drafting a joint household farm plan and budget is an essential tool for this activity. Secondly, the couples receive a subsequent household visit during which the HRNS gender officer continues the coaching and provides support with the implementation of the farm plan and budget. Thirdly, women attend a women leadership training to strengthen their participation and leadership skills within farmer groups and in their household. The final activity is a follow-up workshop in which couples share experiences and self-evaluate the coaching package

Confronting the Wall of Patriarchy: Does participatory intrahousehold Decision Making empower Women in agricultural Households?

This study investigates the impact of introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making on the empowerment of women in agricultural households in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Ugandan coffee farming households. Participatory intrahousehold decision-making is expected to empower women through increasing their voice and reducing collective action problems, which otherwise compromise efficiency and equity of the household farm. With a mixed methods approach this study captures the impact on multiple dimensions of empowerment, including women’s perceptions of the process, meaning and value. Our study qualitatively finds that involvement in strategic household decisions and cash crops is of key importance to women but hard to achieve. Decision-making power over day-to-day household affairs is assigned to them by default, but carries less meaning. Women portrayed three possible pathways towards empowerment in their household: “Breaking through the wall of patriarchy” – the preferred pathway but conditional on being married to a cooperative husband - “Circumventing” it, or having “No choice but to take full responsibility” in case of husbands who are ill or absent. On the basis of a randomized encouragement of couples to participate in an intervention introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making, we quantitatively demonstrated the catalyzing effects on different domains of women’s empowerment, including involvement in strategic household decisions, women’s control over household income, personal income and assets. Women’s decision-making power over cash crop production, another valued strategic domain, increased to some extent. These impacts support women in following a pathway to empowerment by “Breaking through the wall of patriarchy”, but are also valuable for women for whom that pathway is out of reach. Alleviating power imbalances and collective action problems through participatory intrahousehold decision-making has the potential to empower women in domains they value and should be combined with effective ways to accomplish women’s wish to gain economic power to actively contribute to their household’s development

Changes in Women’s Empowerment in the Household, Women’s Diet Diversity, and Their Relationship Against the Background of COVID-19 in Southern Bangladesh

The COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh, associated public health measures, and people’s responses to these measures are projected to have caused job losses among women, who tend to be in more precarious jobs, a decline in women’s empowerment and reduced diet diversity among women. Using a November 2020 telephone survey to re-interview adult women respondents of a November 2019 in-person survey, we test the way and the extent to which women’s employment outside their homes, women’s decision-making power with regard to income use and food purchases, and women’s diet diversity in rural Patuakhali and Faridpur districts changed over the year partly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. We further examine the relationship between change in women’s empowerment and change in women’s outside employment, and the relationship between change in women’s diet diversity and change in women’s empowerment. Contrary to expectations, we find more women found than lost jobs over the past year. The chance that women gained outside employment was 12.2 percent, while the chance they lost employment was 3.5 percent. However, we observe a negative trend in women’s involvement in food purchase decisions in their households. Changes in women’s decision-making power over food purchases are not statistically related to change in women’s outside employment. Gaining employment outside the home is associated with a decrease in women’s autonomy over the use of household income. Contrary to expectations, we find the number of food groups consumed by women increased over the year with COVID-19. The chance that women gained achievement of minimum diet diversity over the year is 38 percent; the chance they lost it 11.5 percent; the chance it did not change is 50.5 percent. Change in women’s diet diversity is positively related with change in women’s decision-making power over food purchases but negatively with change in women’s autonomy over income use

Confronting the Wall of Patriarchy: Does participatory intrahousehold Decision Making empower Women in agricultural Households?

This study investigates the impact of introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making on the empowerment of women in agricultural households in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Ugandan coffee farming households. Participatory intrahousehold decision-making is expected to empower women through increasing their voice and reducing collective action problems, which otherwise compromise efficiency and equity of the household farm. With a mixed methods approach this study captures the impact on multiple dimensions of empowerment, including women’s perceptions of the process, meaning and value. Our study qualitatively finds that involvement in strategic household decisions and cash crops is of key importance to women but hard to achieve. Decision-making power over day-to-day household affairs is assigned to them by default, but carries less meaning. Women portrayed three possible pathways towards empowerment in their household: “Breaking through the wall of patriarchy” – the preferred pathway but conditional on being married to a cooperative husband - “Circumventing” it, or having “No choice but to take full responsibility” in case of husbands who are ill or absent. On the basis of a randomized encouragement of couples to participate in an intervention introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making, we quantitatively demonstrated the catalyzing effects on different domains of women’s empowerment, including involvement in strategic household decisions, women’s control over household income, personal income and assets. Women’s decision-making power over cash crop production, another valued strategic domain, increased to some extent. These impacts support women in following a pathway to empowerment by “Breaking through the wall of patriarchy”, but are also valuable for women for whom that pathway is out of reach. Alleviating power imbalances and collective action problems through participatory intrahousehold decision-making has the potential to empower women in domains they value and should be combined with effective ways to accomplish women’s wish to gain economic power to actively contribute to their household’s development