Case studies of female-headed farms and households in Liberia: a comparative analysis of Grand Bassa, Lofa, and Nimba counties

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study explores female-headed households in Grand Bassa, Lofa and Nimba counties to discern Liberia's smallholding, subsistence agriculture. Amid environmental and communal dynamics, addressing factors causing challenges of farming is imperative.

Methodology: Using explanatory sequential methods this study collects, explains, and organizes farming and household situations qualitatively through field notes, observations, and extensive communications with 44 female farmers. Subsequently and quantitatively, Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) verifies aforementioned information, accompanied by 112 observations.

Findings: Stories encapsulate female farmers in Grand Bassa, Lofa, and Nimba counties. They provide evidence of marginalized, progressive, and emerging farming in order. Children (n > 3) and inadequate support of Kuu (informal labor) and of community make food stability, availability and access insecure. Insufficient crop revenue further exacerbates the issues. Moderate- and mild food-insecure households need not worry about the problems above. However, their earnings notwithstanding, new challenges appear in credit practices and land conflict.

Practical Implications: Extension agents should provide timely services for each community, with special attention to women-headed households. Findings imply ex-post evaluations to ex-ante extension services should be cyclical.

Theoretical Implications: A gender-inclusive, gender-sensitive framework is vital to enhance food security and community resilience, transform subsistence agriculture into agribusiness and achieve fairness, gender equity and social justice for agrarian Liberians – especially women and children.

Originality/Value: This study captures distinctive phases of farming and family life – yielding qualitative and subsequent quantitative validation of predictors of food insecurity in rural, women-headed farming households/operations. It should guide us to tailor ex-ante extension services.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural Liberia
• female-headed farming
• food security
• community resilience
• land-related conflict
• extension

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development for support of this research. We thank interviewees for their help. The most genuine acknowledgments are offered as/if we assist growers, especially female farmers/heads of households, of Grand Bassa, Lofa, and Nimba Counties, to improve farming, their lives, and the lives of their families and communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jaehyun Ahn, Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications and Master of Agribusiness at Texas A&M University, was introduced to agricultural development as a research fellow and field researcher at the Center on Conflict and Development in 2012. His research focuses on the transformation of subsistence farming into prosperous enterprises.

Gary Briers, Ph.D., is Professor of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications at Texas A&M University. As an educator, senior scientist, and extension specialist for almost 50 years, he nurtures agricultural professionals in the United States and around the world. His research addresses experiential learning and the role of agriculture and education in rural economic development and globalization.

Shahriar Kibriya, Ph.D., is Associate Director of the Center on Conflict and Development at Texas A&M University. He has more than eight years of professional and research experience on international development, public policy, quantitative studies of social science, and food security in fragile societies.

Edwin Price, Ph.D., is Professor of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University and holds the Howard G. Buffett Foundation Endowed Chair on Conflict and Development. In 60 years of teaching, research, and extension in 55 countries, he seeks to understand community development and resilience in places of conflict.

ORCID

Jaehyun Ahn http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3159-4281

Gary Briers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9744-119X

Additional information

Funding

Field support was provided by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The United States Agency for International Development supported academic research through the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN).