Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INTRACOF (The impact of intra household decision making on the sustainability, efficiency and equitability of household farming in sub-Saharan Africa.)

Teaser

Smallholder farming is an important way to sustain a livelihood for households in sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure food security of a growing population with increasingly complex dietary demands, these smallholder household farms will need to produce in a sustainably more...

Summary

Smallholder farming is an important way to sustain a livelihood for households in sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure food security of a growing population with increasingly complex dietary demands, these smallholder household farms will need to produce in a sustainably more efficient manner. At the same time, there is a need to reduce inequalities linked to gender, not only for the benefit of women and their families, but also for future sustainable agricultural development and poverty reduction. There is a growing recognition that some of the challenges to sustainable, efficient and equitable outcomes of smallholder farming are situated at the level of the household.
The research project randomly encouraged an intervention introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making in smallholder coffee farming households in Uganda and Tanzania. This enabled assessing the extent to which the effective participation of both spouses in rule- and decision-making about the household farm management contributes to more equitable, efficient and sustainable household farming; hypotheses which are inferred from insights into solutions for collective action challenges that arise with the management of common pool resources.
First, in terms of intrahousehold equity and women’s empowerment, participatory intrahousehold decision-making increased women’s personal asset ownership and women’s involvement in strategic household decisions which gives women a highly valued sense of subjective agency and allows them to contribute their household’s development. Women’s priority of sharing control over the income from coffee with their husband was attained to some degree; greater transparency over coffee income was not.
Secondly, in terms of the impact on efficient and sustainable agriculture-related household choices: There is a positive impact on the joint management of food and cash crops, on the production of food crops with relatively certain harvests and consumable cash crops, and on the adoption of sustainable intensification practices for coffee and food production. Total livestock income went up, income from coffee decreased less than in other households, and households’ wellbeing and food security improved as a result of the intervention.
Thirdly, improved cooperation, induced by the encouraged intervention promoting participatory intrahousehold decision-making, has positive effects on household income per capita, household food security, and investment in agricultural production.
Fourthly, participatory intrahousehold decision-making stimulated cooperative and generous sharing behaviour, measured my means of a lab-in-the-field experiment, among cooperative and generous types of husbands and wives; but reduced cooperation and generosity among less cooperative, less generous types. Men of the less cooperative –generous – type, however, became more cooperative and more generous with intensive coaching.
Realizing impact on the equity, efficiency and sustainability of household farming by introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making, however, may have been still constrained by the structural, deeply rooted customs and norms governing the mode of operation in agricultural households that it challenged; and may require a longer time frame for the interventions to result in more measurable changes.

Work performed

A randomised encouragement design enabled estimating the impact of an intensive and less intensive part of an intervention introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making among smallholder coffee farming households in Uganda and Tanzania. Four openly accessible working papers were published on the topics mentioned above. A monitoring toolkit, co-developed during the researcher’s secondment to the partner organisation the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung, was published as a freely accessible policy brief.
Training of the researcher comprised of the collaboration with the partner organisation the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture Uganda; a research visit at the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia; an online course; and on-the-job training in research management and public engagement. The presentation of research results during research seminars and at two international conferences contributed to the researcher’s training as well.
Outreach and public engagement entailed knowledge and skill enhancement of young researchers and development practitioners; and mutual learning with research subjects. Research output was shared with the wider public and various stakeholders active in development by presentations and output for audiences composed of non-profit, private and public sector stakeholders with a research and policy interest in gender, smallholder agriculture, development and from the coffee sector. Two blog posts were published and the researcher presented her research in a widely watched television programme of the Flemish public television broadcaster VRT using the metaphor of the Smurfs.

Final results

Progress beyond the state of the art by the research project lies in 1) the demonstration of the potential to change intrahousehold decision-making for more efficient, sustainable and equitable outcomes, thereby also testing the hypotheses that some mechanisms at work in common pool resources can be extrapolated to agricultural households; 2) explicitly acknowledging the subjective nature of women’s empowerment by placing the observed impact on aspects of women’s empowerment in the context of the meaning and value women allot to these; 3) providing evidence of a positive impact of improved intrahousehold cooperation on household welfare and household public good provision; and 4) showing the impact of the randomised introduction of participatory intrahousehold decision-making on spouses’ cooperative and sharing behaviour measured by means of a lab-in-the-field experiment.
The impact of the research project includes reaching the researcher’s goal of being an independent professional researcher with an established reputation in research on gender, intrahousehold decision-making and collective action in development contexts. The project contributed to building a pool of young researchers in the North and the South with the knowledge and the skills to engage in development and gender research. The research project reached a wider public outside the academic and development sector through coverage in the media and potentially contributed to a wider appreciation of the value of development and gender research.
Participatory intrahousehold decision-making, randomly introduced as part of the research project, signified positive changes for the smallholder coffee farming households; the revision of the intervention to reach the unaccomplished objectives forms additional tangible societal impact. The insights into ways to promote more efficient, sustainable and gender inclusive agricultural development by addressing constraints at the intrahousehold level can inform development policy, more specifically policy working towards the sustainable development goals five (gender equality) and thirteen (climate change), to which the EU has expressed a strong engagement. The results will contribute to the coffee sector’s increased efforts for an inclusive coffee value chain that sustainably benefits entire households. The monitoring toolkit and interest by other organisations are promising avenues for furthering societal impact.