Researching land and commercial agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa with a gender perspective: concepts, issues and methods

This paper offers critical reflections on the concepts, issues and methods that are important for integrating a gender perspective into mainstream research and policy-making on land and agricultural commercialisation in Africa. It forms part of the Land and Agricultural Commercialisation in Africa (LACA) project undertaken by the Future Agricultures Consortium between 2012 and 2015 and informs the case studies conducted across three countries: Kenya, Ghana and Zambia. The paper compares key gender issues that arise across three different models of agricultural commercialisation: plantation, contract farming and small- and medium-scale commercial farming. It further discusses how concepts and research methods deriving from the literature on gender and agriculture may be applied to mainstream research. The paper highlights the need for an integrated approach to researching gender and agrarian change in Africa. In particular, the existing gender literature provides a rich legacy for researchers of all disciplines to inform their research design and analysis. The authors argue for a more systematic evaluation of the gender implications of agricultural commercialisation across interconnected social levels: household, local community and the wider political economy

Narratives of Scarcity: Framing the Global Land Rush

Global resource scarcity has become a central policy concern, with predictions of rising populations, natural resource depletion and hunger. The narratives of scarcity that arise as a result justify actions to harness resources considered ‘underutilised’, leading to contestations over rights and entitlements and producing new scarcities. Yet scarcity is contingent, contextual, relational and above all political. We present an analysis of three framings – absolute, relative and political scarcity – associated with the intellectual traditions of Malthus, Ricardo and Marx, respectively. A review of 134 global and Africa-specific policy and related sources demonstrates how diverse framings of scarcity – what it is, its causes and what is to be done – are evident in competing narratives that animate debates about the future of food and farming in Africa and globally. We argue that current mainstream narratives emphasise absolute and relative scarcity, while ignoring political scarcity. Opening up this debate, with a more explicit focus on political scarcities is, we argue, important; emphasising how resources are distributed between different needs and uses, and so different people and social classes. For African settings, seen as both a source of abundant resources and a site where global scarcities may be resolved, as well as where local scarcities are being experienced most acutely, a political scarcity framing on the global land rush, and resource questions more broadly, is, we suggest, essential.Economic and Social Research Counci

Rights and Resources: The Effects of External Financing on Organising for Women's Rights

This report concerns the historical trajectory of women's rights organisations (WROs) in Bangladesh and Ghana within the changing national contexts as well as the shifting international aid landscape in the last two decades and identifies the influence of external financing on what the organisations do and how they go about it. The report offers a model for how to study the question in other contexts and it can be used by WROs in other countries to reflect upon the relevance of the findings in their own context and to respond accordingly. The influence of international aid, particularly in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade was in many ways beneficial for organisational effectiveness. Recently the funding landscape has become more hostile with funders' interest in rights and social transformation declining. Nevertheless in this environment maintaining the legitimacy of the discourse of women's rights as integral to gender and development policies has not been easy either for gender officers in aid organisations or for the WROs and although the organisations have managed to keep their identity, a sense of autonomy and a continued commitment, they are struggling to find their way. International funders are missing an important opportunity to support WROs in a manner that would optimise their capacity to mobilise women to formulate and voice their demands for gender justice.Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and UN Wome

FATE: Feminisation, Agricultural Transition and rural Employment

Project summary and description of the FATE project (Feminisation, agricultural transition and rural employment) - social and political conditions of asset building in the context of export-led agricultur

Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change

Whether or not investments in African agriculture can generate quality employment at scale,avoid dispossessing local people of their land,promote diversified and sustainable livelihoods, and catalyse more vibrant local economies depends on what farming model is pursued. In this Forum, we build on recent scholarship by discussing the key findings of our recent studies in Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. We examined cases of three models of agricultural commercialisation, characterised by different sets of institutional arrangements that link land, labour and capital. The three models are: plantations or estates with on-farm processing; contract farming and outgrower schemes; and medium-scale commercial farming areas. Building on core debates in the critical agrarian studies literature, we identify commercial farming areas and contract farming as producing the most local economic linkages, and plantations/estates as producing more jobs, although these are of low quality and mostly casual. We point to the gender and generational dynamics emerging in the three models, which reflect the changing demand for family and wage labour. Models of agricultural commercialisation do not always deliver what is expected of them in part because local conditions play a critical role in the unfolding outcomes for land relations, labour regimes, livelihoods and local economies

"We have no voice for that" : Land Rights, Power, and Gender in Rural Sierra Leone

Acknowledgements I wish to thank the participants in the Gender and Land Governance Conference at Utrecht University in January 2013 for helpful comments and suggestions. Funding I would like to thank the Faculty of Management at Radboud University Nijmegen for funding the six months of fieldwork on which this article is based.Peer reviewedPostprin

Paper presented at IDRC Symposium on “Gendered Terrain : Women’s Rights and Access to Land in Africa”, 13-16 September 2010, Nairobi, Kenya (Session 1)

PowerPoint presentationThere is a growing consensus that solutions to women’s land tenure problems need to be grounded in local specificities. This brief presentation approaches the problem from the point of view of questioning the policy arena, customary law, and how to strengthen national mechanisms that promote the advancement of women