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    An analysis of gender in intra-household decision-making as an important socio-economic factor in agriculture-nutrition linkages
    (2021) Sariyev, Orkhan; Zeller, Manfred
    In 2018, almost 2 billion people around the globe experienced severe or moderate levels of food insecurity. Poverty is strongly linked with food insecurity, and most of the extreme poor live in rural areas where agriculture is the main livelihood. Thus, agricultural and rural development have profound implications for rural households. Agricultural produce is consumed or marketed or both; when marketed, the generated income can be used for (safe and nutritious) food purchases and non-food expenditures, including medical expenses and investments in sanitation. Some income may not be consumed directly but saved or invested in the form of physical, social or human capital. Moreover, considering that the end goal of development should be an environment in which people can be creative and freely enjoy a long and healthy life, rural and agricultural development will have implications for all elements of human development: health, education, poverty, environment, security, women’s status, and finally, food and nutrition. The effect is seemingly more direct and profound in terms of its contribution to a healthy household environment and food security, which together determine nutritional outcomes. However, this seemingly straightforward linkage between agriculture and nutrition is challenged by numerous socio-economic factors. This dissertation concentrates on the gender dynamics of intra-household decision-making as an important socio-economic factor in the agriculture and nutrition framework. Here, I refer to gender dynamics as the interactions and relations between men and women that can strengthen or confront the social norms of a society. Thus, the main objective is to examine the gender dynamics of decision-making as an important component of agriculture-nutrition linkages. There are three sub-objectives that concentrate on selected linkages within the framework. Given the high concentration of women’s empowerment literature in social contexts in which females are underprivileged, the first sub-objective is to investigate the implications of women’s empowerment in contexts in which women historically experienced equality or favoritism. Second, concentrating on the role of women’s empowerment in the agriculture and nutrition framework, the next objective is to study the implications of women’s empowerment on varietal adoption, diversified production, and consumption. The third objective is to examine the viability of production diversification as a strategy to improve household diets. The findings of this dissertation are based on data collected from Bhutanese and Ethiopian households. The survey in Bhutan employed multistage random sampling; it was implemented in November 2017 and covered 251 households in two central districts of Bhutan: Tsirang and Dagana. The survey in Ethiopia was conducted in 2014 and 2016 and covered 390 Ethiopian households located in a radius of circa 150-200 km around the town of Hawassa. These households were randomly selected from a sample of farmers from a survey that was conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in 2012. This dissertation has five chapters. The first chapter gives a general overview and provides a conceptual framework that helps to describe the research topics and questions investigated in the following chapters. The three following chapters are scientific papers that have been prepared for publication in scientific journals. The second chapter deals with the first sub-objective. It investigates women’s participation in crucial domains of intra-household decision-making and its implications for dietary quality in Bhutanese households. The third chapter studies the effect of the main female’s risk preference on the adoption of high-yielding varieties (HYVs) conditional on the dominance of female preferences declared in domestic decision-making. The fourth chapter explores the association between women’s participation in decision-making and both agricultural production and dietary diversity. The final chapter concludes the dissertation, highlights main limitations, and gives recommendations for future research and policies. Chapter 1 discusses the agriculture-nutrition linkages and interacting socio-economic factors of interest in the conceptual framework of the dissertation. Chapter 2 investigates the implications of women’s participation in domestic decision-making processes for dietary quality in Bhutanese rural households. Bhutan was selected as the country of interest for this chapter because polyandry and matrilineal succession were still observed in some ethnic groups through the 20th century. We employ a mixed methods research approach to investigate women’s participation in domestic decision-making processes and its implications for dietary quality at the household level. Considering the historical presence of matrilineal succession in Bhutan, we also check for any association between women’s land ownership and participation in domestic decision-making using non-parametric tests. Quantitative analyses and in-depth interviews reveal no lack of participation in crucial domains of domestic decision-making for Bhutanese women. We observe a positive association between women’s participation in decision-making and their property rights; thus, it is plausible that the matrilineal succession might have provided for women’s empowerment over time. Moreover, we find that gender equality in decision-making results in better dietary diversity in Bhutanese households. Given the results, we recommend that social programs focus not merely on women’s empowerment, but gender-equal human development in general. The findings contribute to the gender literature and emphasize the importance of gender equality. Considering that females are generally found to be more risk averse than males and that risk aversion hinders technology adoption, in Chapter 3, we study the importance of the main female decision-maker’s risk preference for the adoption of HYVs in Ethiopia. Most often, food security is the ultimate goal for the rural poor in Ethiopia. Their risk preferences are likely to determine their willingness to trade some short-term security for a greater potential income and security in the future. Rural households are disinclined to adopt new varieties as they are unfamiliar and present a risk of failure. The number of female decision-makers in a household is assumed to reflect the dominance of female preference declared in household decision-making. The main female decision-maker is assumed to be empowered to express her preferences more strongly and freely when the decision-making processes involves more female members. In this case, the impact of her risk preferences is likely to be more profound. To the best of my knowledge, this hypothesis has not been investigated before. Considering that rural households are constrained differently, we want to study both adoption and intensity of the HYV adoption. The results show no effect of the main female’s or male’s risk preferences on the adoption of HYV seeds. It is observed that the adoption decision is mostly determined by access and availability, which are captured by wealth, access to extension, and all-weather roads. We observe a positive association between the main female’s risk preference and the intensity of the adoption at higher levels of women’s participation in decision-making. As hypothesized, the conditionality of the effect of female risk preference on the level of female dominance in decision-making is observed. Given these results, we conclude that the main female’s risk preference matters for the intensity of HYV adoption. Given the potential risk of crop failure when adopting HYV, a risk-taking female is willing to risk her household’s short-run security to a potential learning effect from the new variety and potentially gain a higher income and more security in the long-run. The findings from this chapter contribute to the gender and technology adoption literature. The study interacts female risk preference with a proxy that measures female dominance in decision-making in an HYV adoption study. The results of our analysis of the role of the main female’s risk preferences in agricultural technology adoption signify the importance of a gendered lens to intra-household decision-making and risk preferences for future empirical studies. Nutrition sensitive agricultural development programs consider diversified farm production as a promising strategy to achieve better dietary outcomes for rural poor who are mostly subsistence oriented. In Chapter 4, we mainly question the viability of this strategy for rural Ethiopian households. Furthermore, considering that both household-level production diversification and consumption choices are outcomes of intra-household decision-making, we investigate the implications of women’s participation in the domains of decision-making for both outcomes. Thus, there are two objectives in Chapter 4. The first is to estimate the association between production diversification and household dietary diversity in various settings, and the second is to examine the association of female participation in decision-making with both livelihood outcomes separately. We find that on-farm diversification can be a feasible strategy to improve the diets of those who are mostly subsistence oriented and therefore highly dependent on agricultural production and those who live a great distance from markets. These results were obtained by employing and carefully interpreting multiplicative interaction models. We find that women’s participation in decision-making regarding which crops are grown is associated with more diversity both in terms of food groups and the number of different livestock and crop species produced. Nevertheless, we do not find any association when both evenness and richness of crop species are considered together as an indicator of diversification. This is due to the fact that sampled Ethiopian women are observed to be involved in decision-making on small plots, such as kitchen gardens, which contribute to the richness of species but not to the evenness in terms of the cultivated area. Furthermore, we estimate a positive association between women’s decision-making regarding household expenditures (that include food, clothing, and household and agricultural assets) and dietary diversity indicators. In light of these results, we conclude that development programs could promote production diversification in remote rural areas where markets and non-farm income are hardly accessible, but even then, the viability of this strategy is very questionable due to the marginal effects that demand mostly unrealistic changes. We recommend that more attention and effort be directed toward gender-inclusive social and economic development policies together with infrastructural and market development projects to achieve sustainable returns to nutrition. We contribute to the agriculture and nutrition literature by highlighting an important covariate, that is gendered decision-making, and calling attention to an in-depth approach to the analyses of this kind to better assist practitioners. Overall, the main contribution of this dissertation is that the gender dynamics in intra-household decision-making is an important socio-economic factor in the agriculture and nutrition framework. The findings prove that gender sensitive policies and programs will contribute to this component and sustain the linkages between agriculture and nutrition in rural areas. It is observed that women’s empowerment in farming and household-related decision-making positively contributes to various components like varietal adoption, diversification, and household-level dietary diversity in the agriculture and nutrition framework. However, extensive contextual knowledge is necessary to ensure that gender bias is correctly approached and treated to yield positive and sustainable outcomes in different societal settings.