Can Integrated Agriculture-Nutrition Programmes Change Gender Norms on Land and Asset Ownership? Evidence from Burkina Faso

Abstract

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyse the impact of an integrated agriculture and nutrition programme in Burkina Faso on women’s and men’s assets, and norms regarding ownership, use and control of assets. We use a cluster-randomised controlled trial to determine whether productive asset transfers and increased income-generating opportunities for women increase women’s assets over time. Qualitative work on gender norms finds that although men still own and control most assets, women have greater decision-making power and control over home gardens and their produce, and attitudes towards women owning property have become more favourable in treatment areas.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Julia Behrman for her support in the first round of this research and the design of the qualitative questionnaires, Esteban Quiñones for his contribution to the analysis of the quantitative data, Marie Ruel for insightful comments, Nicole Rosenvaigue and Caroline Guiriec for their work on translating the questionnaires from English to French for the qualitative data collection, and members of the GAAP and its External Advisory Committee for comments and discussions at project workshops. All data are available upon request. All errors and omissions are ours.

Notes

1. Although there is a large literature on different types of unearned transfers, most studies do not compare outcomes of a transfer made to women versus men (Yoong et al., 2012, p. 16). In total, only 15 studies examining five types of transfers (conditional cash transfers, unconditional cash transfers (including child benefits and old-age pensions) and cash and in-kind grants to microenterprises and micro-credit) were included in this systematic review.

2. While some studies on the impacts of agricultural interventions on women’s empowerment have demonstrated increases in women’s (control over) income or participation in household decision-making, others have not found such impacts, or have found mixed results (van den Bold et al., 2013a). In some cases, men saw higher increases in income compared to women, maintained control over income, household resources, and higher value assets, or took over control of certain assets as they became more profitable (Carney 1988; von Braun and Webb 1989).

3. For example, Lastarria-Cornhiel (1997) discusses implications of various customary land tenure systems across Africa for men’s and women’s land rights; in some societies, women may own land, but are prohibited from ploughing (Mogues et al., 2009). Doss and Deere (2006) review studies that examine gender asset gaps and reasons why these gaps persist.

4. While access and withdrawal are usually considered to be ‘use rights’, exclusion, management and alienation are considered to be more empowering ‘control rights’. ‘Ownership’ encompasses both of these ‘bundles of rights’ (Meinzen-Dick et al., 2011).

5. Traditionally, the VMF was run by a household that had a large piece of land and experience with farming, but this model tended to favour male farmers who ran the VMF as a business rather than as part of a community development programme (Hillenbrand, 2010).

6. Each VMF was approximately 1500 m²; a small number of villages could not accommodate this space and had VMFs of 1,000–1,200 m².

7. Each beneficiary woman received two chickens from the programme, and each VMF received 10 chickens and one rooster. In five villages, each VMF also received six goats. The average number of animals transferred to beneficiary women depended not only on the programme allotment of animals, but also the biological success of the village’s first year breeding programme before transfer to beneficiaries.

8. Within the treatment group, the BCC strategy differed among two equal subgroups of the treatment (15 villages each). The two groups of intervention villages differed only by who delivered the health and nutrition counselling to the beneficiary women. In one group of 15 treatment villages, the BCC strategy was carried out by Older Women Leaders, and in the other group of 15 treatment villages it was carried out by village Health Committee members. The agricultural intervention was similar across all treatment villages and as such we pool them for the purposes of this article.

9. A woman was not able to inherit the land if she wanted to remarry outside of the husband’s family, although this was reported more among women than among men. Furthermore, women were unable to inherit land from their husbands if they had no children with him (van den Bold et al. 2013b).

10. T-tests (not reported here) indicate that for all outcomes reported in Table 6, differences between intervention and control villages are significant at p < 0.001.

11. A significant proportion of men and women in both types of villages also expected to see changes in the way in which men were able to own/use land in the future. Changes were expected to occur mainly in the ability to purchase or lease land and government distribution of lands, as well as an expectation that land scarcity will make access to cultivable lands increasingly difficult. Both men and women in participating villages expected that some form of land development and redistribution/subdivision of land would occur. Those who did not expect any future changes in men’s ability to own and/or use land cited traditional practices as the main reason (van den Bold et al. 2013b).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was provided by the United States Agency for International Development, Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA) through Helen Keller International (HKI), the Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project (GAAP), supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and by the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).