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What Does Gender Yield Gap Tell Us about Smallholder Farming in Developing Countries?

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/11695/
https://doi.org/10.3390/su13010077
doi:10.3390/su13010077
 
Title What Does Gender Yield Gap Tell Us about Smallholder Farming in Developing Countries?
 
Creator Nchanji, E B
Collins, O A
Katungi, E
Nduguru, A
Kabungo, C
Njuguna, E M
Ojiewo, C O
 
Subject Smallholder Farmers
Agriculture-Farming, Production, Technology, Economics
Gender Research
 
Description This study examines the extent of the productivity gap between male and female bean
producers, its discriminatory nature and implications for the policymakers in agriculture in Tanzania.
Generally, women are distinctively “invisible” in agriculture, due to social norms and even from the
national agricultural policy perspective. Their discrimination arises from uncounted and unaccounted
for farm work, and their productivity is reduced by triple roles, limited access to education, having
triple effects on access to technology, training and land rights. In research, issues of concern to them
such as nutritious food crops, varietal selection on important attributes, household food security,
convenient home storage and small-scale processing are widely ignored through unfavourable
policy design. Given the above discriminatory issues surrounding women in agriculture, they are
hypothesised to be less productive and often lag behind male counterparts in crop production.
To test the above hypothesis, a three-stage stratified sampling method was used to collect crosssectional
data in 2016 across four regions of Tanzania. Then, an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition
method (at means) was used to apportion the sources of the difference between men and women
into explained and unexplained variations. Further improvements through the newly developed
Re-Centered Influence Functions (RIFs) remarkably improved outcomes as the differences were
analysed through unconditional partial effects on quantiles. Using a counterfactual approach and
correcting for selection bias, the model provided consistent estimates for easy comparison of the two
groups. Besides this, it emerged that interventions such as providing improved bean seed varieties
and training farmers on good agricultural practices reduced the gender yield gap and provided
a potential avenue for addressing the discrimination observed in productivity among males and
females. Controlling for selection bias also improved the model, but the real discrimination was
observed at the 50th percentile, where the majority of the respondents lay within. However, if a
female’s age, family size, additional years of schooling and discretion to spend income from beans
were taken away, they would be worse off. Our study finds that females comprised 25 percent
of the sample, had 6 percent lower productivity, provided 64.70 percent on-farm labour and had
0.32 hectares less land compared to males, ceteris paribus. Access to improved varieties contributed to a
35.4 percent improved productivity compared to growing indigenous/local varieties. The implication
is that the gender yield gap can be reduced significantly if efforts are focused on preventing or
correcting factors causing discrimination against women.
 
Publisher MDPI
 
Date 2020-12
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/11695/1/sustainability-13-00077-v2.pdf
Nchanji, E B and Collins, O A and Katungi, E and Nduguru, A and Kabungo, C and Njuguna, E M and Ojiewo, C O (2020) What Does Gender Yield Gap Tell Us about Smallholder Farming in Developing Countries? Sustainability, 13 (1). pp. 1-18. ISSN 2071-1050