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

Although crucial in sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farming households are not always managed efficiently. The INTRACOF project sheds light on this challenge and contributed to solve them using intensive coaching.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 80 % of farmland is managed by smallholders with a land of less than 10 hectares. Think of it as pretty much the opposite of Europe’s primarily industrial agricultural sector: most of our food revolves around 12 plants and 5 animal species. Smallholders – essentially family-run farms – are the ones who keep biodiversity alive.

These smallholders, however, are under threat. From the outside as they face the competitive pressure from globalisation, but also from the inside, as Dr Els Lecoutere of the University of Antwerp has been showing throughout her research efforts in East Africa.

“In smallholder farming households, every member of the household participates in agricultural production. But at the end of the day, the income is not always shared fairly. Most of it tends to stay in the husband’s pockets and he can be tempted to reap the benefits of common work, often at the expense of women. This is called the appropriation dilemma,” Dr Lecoutere explains. “This, in turn, can contribute to underinvestment in farming activities and even side-selling of part of the harvest by some household members.”

All in all, these issues make for inefficient household farm exploitation and sustained gender inequity. Dr Lecoutere has therefore decided to devote her latest research to evaluating the impact of appropriation, as well as helping establish better ‘rules of the game’ under a more participatory decision-making model.

To get there, Dr Lecoutere worked with an organisation providing intensive coaching in participatory intra-household decision-making: They focused on agricultural production, resource allocation and income expenditure to smallholder coffee farming households in Uganda and Tanzania.

The coaching was found to have many positive effects. These include greater collaboration between husband and wife, adoption of sustainable intensification practices, increased food safety, reduced livestock selling, greater female involvement in strategic decisions, and greater female control over household cattle. However, even though the coaching resulted in women being better informed about the amount of income generated by selling coffee, the coaching failed to grant them with more access to income.

According to Dr Lecoutere, this is hardly a surprise. “This goes against deeply rooted gender roles. Besides, women being excluded from receiving coffee income is also sustained by the marketing and payment system for coffee, which pays to the head of the household – the husband in most cases.”

The project coordinator insists on the potential of changing this system. She says that coffee marketing bodies could, for instance, send out sales-related information by SMS to both household co-heads; pay out coffee income to common household bank accounts; or give it partly to the husband and partly to the wife. Dr Lecoutere also cites ‘masculinity workshops’ conducted in Latin America, where norms dictating men’s roles and responsibilities are called into question during all-men discussion groups, as a potential source of inspiration.

Besides its interesting recommendations, the project has come up with a toolkit that can be used as a reference guide for designing a framework for monitoring or evaluating changes in intra-household decision-making. In the long run, Dr Lecoutere hopes that her research will help smallholder farming households to overcome semi-subsistence and poverty and allow rural women to fully live the lives they value.

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

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