Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa

Longitudinal Perspectives from Six Countries

Edited by Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Cuthbert Isinika

Uses a unique dataset following smallholders across six countries
Benefits from a cross-country comparative approach
Interdisciplinary, with a mixture of cross-sectional and panel level analysis providing both empirical knowledge and accessible information
Covers Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique
An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence

Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa

Longitudinal Perspectives from Six Countries

Edited by Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Cuthbert Isinika

Description

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa uses a longitudinal cross-country comparative approach to contribute to the understanding of smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Relying on unique household level data collected in six African countries since 2002, it addresses the dynamics of intensification and diversification within and outside agriculture in contexts where women have much poorer access to agrarian resources than men.

Despite a growing interest in smallholder agriculture in Africa, this interest has not been matched by the research on the subject. While recent policies focus on reducing poverty through encouraging smallholder agriculture, there are few studies showing how livelihoods have changed since this time, and especially how such changes may have affected male and female headed households differently. Moreover, agriculture is often viewed in isolation from other types of income generating opportunities, like small scale trading. Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa looks at how livelihoods have changed over time and how this has affected the relationship between agricultural and non-agricultural sources of livelihoods. In general, women have much poorer access to agricultural sources of income, and for this reason the interplay between farm and non-farm sources of income is especially important to analyse.

Providing suggestions for more inclusive policies related to rural development, this edited volume outlines current weaknesses and illustrates potential opportunities for change. It offers a nuanced alternative to the current dominance of structural transformation narratives of agricultural change through adding insights from gender studies as well as village-level studies of agrarian development. It positions change in relation to broader livelihood dynamics outside the farm sector and contextualises them nationally and regionally to provide a necessary analytical adaption to the unfolding empirical realities of rural Africa.

Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa

Longitudinal Perspectives from Six Countries

Edited by Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Cuthbert Isinika

1:Introduction- theoretical and methodological framing of the book, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Isinika
2:African smallholder farmers on the move: farm and non-farm trends for six sub-Saharan African countries, 2002-2015, Magnus Jirström, Maria Archila Bustos, and Sarah Alobo Loison
3:Assets, gender, and rural livelihoods, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt
4:Gender and rural livelihoods: agricultural commercialization and farm non-farm diversification, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt
5:Agrarian change and structural transformation: drivers and distributional outcomes, Göran Djurfeldt, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Ola Hall, and Maria Archila Bustos
6:Agricultural intensification response to agricultural input subsidies in Tanzania: a spatial-temporal and gender perspective 2002-2015, Elibariki Msuya, Aida Isinika, and Fred Mawunyo Dzanku
7:Intensification, crop diversification and gender relations in Malawi, Peter Mvula and Wapulumuka Mulwafu
8:Policies or prices? A gendered analysis of drivers of maize production in Malawi and Zambia, 2002-2013, Ellen Hillbom and Martin Prowse
9:Spatial and gendered linkages between non-farm diversification and farm productivity in Ghana, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku and Daniel Bruce Sarpong
10:Technology use, gender, and impact of non-farm income on agricultural investment: an empirical analysis of maize production in two regions of Kenya, Stephen K. Wambugu, Joseph T. Karugia , and Willis O. Kosura
11:Gender, Agriculture, and Diversification in Rural Africa: What Lessons Can We Learn?, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Isinika

Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa

Longitudinal Perspectives from Six Countries

Edited by Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Cuthbert Isinika

Author Information

Edited by Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Professor, Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, Research Fellow, Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research, University of Ghana, and Aida Cuthbert Isinika, Professor, Institute of Continuing Education, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania

Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt is Team Leader of the Afrint group, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from six research institutions in Africa, and the Departments of Human Geography, Statistics, Sociology and Economic History at Lund University. Agnes' research interests focus on rural based processes of transformation within and outside agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa involving changing rural and multi-spatial livelihoods, gender based access to productive resources within and outside agriculture, consumption, and intra-household division of labor and income. She uses a mixed-methods approach combining the use of panel level data from the Afrint database with qualitative field work at the individual, household, and village level.

Fred Mawunyo Dzanku is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana. His interests span a range of research areas including the economics of rural households, applied econometric modelling, agricultural production economics, food security, and project impact evaluation. He has extensive experience in the implementation of household surveys, and multi-country longitudinal surveys in rural areas of developing countries including Mali, Uganda, and Ghana.

Aida Cuthbert Isinika is currently based at the Institute of Continuing Education at the Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania. Her research interests include production economics, resource use efficiency, value chain analysis, land tenure studies, and development and rural development in general. Under the Afrint research project, Aida has led the Tanzanian research team since 2002, and has edited two Afrint publications.

Contributors:

Sarah Alobo Loison- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Maria Archila Bustos- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Daniel Bruce Sarpong- Department of Agricultural Economics & Agribusiness, School of Agriculture,College Basic and Applied Sciences, University of Ghana Legon-Accra, Ghana
Göran Djurfeldt- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Ola Hall- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Ellen Hillbom- Department of Economic History, Lund, Sweden
Aida Isinika- Sokoine University of Agriculture, Institute of Continuing Education, Mororogoro, Tanzania
Magnus Jirström- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Joseph T. Karugia- Coordinator, Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System for Eastern and Central Africa (ReSAKSS-ECA), International Livestock Research Institute, Kenya
Willis O. Kosura- Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Nairobi, Nairobi
Fred Mawunyo Dzanku- Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research,University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana
Elibariki Msuya- School of Agricultural Economics and Business Studies (SAEBS); Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania
Wapulumuka Mulwafu
Peter Mvula- Centre for Social Research, Faculty of Social Science, Chancellor College, University of Malawi
Martin Prowse- Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Stephen K. Wambugu- Department of Arts and Humanities, Chuka University, Chuka, Kenya