TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF RESEARCH ON WOMEN FARMERS IN AFRICA: LESSONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS; WITH AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY



Due to the complexity of household strategies and
dynamics, it will be difficult for a research institute to
design technologies that will necessarily benefit women or
other target groups in particular. This does not imply that
research organizations should ignore gender analysis or
gender issues. Instead, research organizations can strive to
understand how gender may affect the adoption and
impact of new technologies. This paper reviews a large
number of studies on African agriculture and concludes
that access to land, labor, inputs and outputs, and the
decision-making power within the household may affect
decisions about technologies. Each section of the paper
shows how gender can be included in analyses of
technology adoption and impacts. The conclusion of the
paper outlines some ways in which our understanding of
gender issues can shape the activities of CIMMYT and
other agricultural research organizations.

Labor

The willingness to adopt new technology depends, in part,
on the farmer’s expectations for increased output or the
alleviation of constraints resulting from its use. One such
constraint is the lack of access to labor. A number of
factors bear on a household’s labor constraints, including
the gender division of labor, access to household labor, and
access to hired labor. Different crop technologies may
require concentrations of labor at different times during
the growing season. To the extent that men and women
perform different tasks or have different access to outside
resources, the gender of the farmer may affect the adoption
of technology.

Labor allocation issues have received the most attention
in studies of the effects of gender on the adoption of new
technologies and increased agricultural productivity. Many
studies have tried to explain differences in the gender
division of labor across areas and across regions. Boserup’s
early work described Africa as the area where female
farming was the prevalent mode of agricultural
production, claiming that female farming occurs in areas
that are sparsely populated and where shifting cultivation
is used (Boserup 1970). Burton reviews many of the early
anthropological works on the gender division of labor. He
claims that the most important predictors of women’s
contribution to agriculture are the number of dry months
and the importance of domesticated animals to
subsistence; crop type and use of the plow are less
important (Burton and White 1984). These
generalizations, however, do not provide us with a
serviceable framework for understanding the diverse
patterns of labor allocation found in Africa.

Gender Division of Labor

In many places in Africa, traditionally there has been a
strict division of labor by gender in agriculture. This
division of labor may be based on crop or task, and both
types of division of labor by gender may occur
simultaneously. Women may mobilize male labor for some
tasks involved in their crops and men frequently mobilize
women’s labor for crops that they control. These divisions
are not static and may change in response to new
economic opportunities.

Division by crop

In some areas, men and women may tend to grow different
crops (see Udry [1996] and Hoddinott et al. [1995] for
discussion on Burkina Faso). One frequently made
distinction is that cash crops and export crops are “male
crops,” while subsistence crops are “female crops” (e.g.,
Kumar 1987; Randolf 1988; Koopman 1993). The
standard explanation for the division of crops by gender is
that women are responsible for feeding the family and thus
prefer to grow subsistence crops for household
consumption. Men involved with agriculture, on the other
hand, are responsible for providing cash income and so are
said to grow cash and export crops. In general, however, it
is difficult to tell whether women grow lower-value
subsistence crops because they have different preferences
and concerns or because they have limited access to land,
inputs, credit, information, or markets.

The situation with maize is particularly complicated.
Maize may be grown as both a cash and a subsistence crop.
High-yielding varieties were introduced in many areas to
help generate a marketable surplus, but many of these
varieties had different processing, cooking, and storage
characteristics than the local varieties. The high-yielding
varieties were often promoted as cash crops. Consequently,



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