The Limits of Instrumentalism: Informal Work and Gendered Cycles of Food Insecurity in Mozambique

Abstract

The instrumentalist literature suggests that women can help achieve household food security if they have access to productive resources but do not become overburdened as a result. This paper seeks to assess the relevance of this literature by exploring the gendered cycles of food insecurity in the context of women’s informal labour in northern Mozambique. It considers the relation between women and food security as embedded in the broader socio-economic setting, and finds that the interaction of different forms of deprivation, such as lack of secure employment and conflicting labour demands, generates food insecurity.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Bridget O’Laughlin, Naila Kabeer, Alessandra Mezzadri and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on this paper. I am deeply grateful to Deborah Johnston and Harry West for their guidance throughout this research. This research was funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research in Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Instrumental approaches to gender equality hinge on two corollary arguments. First, gender equality is seen as conducive to poverty reduction, a proposition that emerges from literature studying the relationship between gender equality and economic development (Duflo, 2012). Second, gender equality is seen as contributing to wellbeing promotion, which emerges from studies highlighting the importance of women (mothers) in domains such as child nutrition, health and education (Smith et al., 2003). This study scrutinises the latter, with a specific focus on food and nutrition outcomes.

2. The studies reviewed in this section are of two types. One group is that of early studies that are widely cited in subsequent literature. The other is composed of a selection of the most recent literature on the topic, especially that focusing on countries and regions in sub-Saharan Africa. Key academic journals in development studies, economics and nutrition were searched as well as relevant grey literature.

3. Women’s status is assessed by two indexes: women’s relative decision-making power and societal gender equality. The first is calculated on the basis of four household-level dimensions of gender (in)equality: whether a woman works for cash or not (operationalised as a dummy variable), women’s age at first marriage, per cent difference in the woman’s and her partner’s age and difference in the woman’s and her partner’s year of education. The second is based on three societal-level dimensions: difference in wasting between boys and girls under five years old, difference in vaccination score between boys and girls under five years old and difference in years of education of adult women and men.

4. See for example the Guardian on the debt crisis in Mozambique, on 27 October 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/oct/27/mozambique-debt-crisis-first-sign-global-financial-shockwave.

5. When updated and comprehensive lists of households are not available, research practice suggests that a random point is chosen to then select households along a direction from the starting point (Bennett, Woods, Liyanage, & Smith, 1991). Given the structure of the villages where the survey was conducted – all divided in similarly-sized sub-units – a variation of the conventional method was used and households were randomly selected in equal numbers from each sub-unit of a village or neighbourhood. Thus 40 households were selected in each district, using a stratified random sample.

6. Cash-earning women are those who engaged with paid work and/or cash-earning activities in the year before the interview.

7. This interpretation is also supported by the evidence on gendered cash allowances, which, as discussed in Section 4.1, suggests that men’s incomes are those that households tend to rely on to meet their basic needs.

8. Wealth was measured by an asset index. Women were asked questions about possession of specific assets in their household, such as a TV, fridge and framed bed, as well as about housing conditions. The asset index was constructed using principal component analysis, following Filmer and Pritchett (2001), Wall and Johnston (2008) and Abreu (2012). The first quartile is the poorest and the fourth the wealthiest.

9. It would be interesting to assess whether household composition shapes food security independently of household wealth. However, it is slippery to test this association as family members who can take up household and care work may not live in the same household, which was commonly observed in the qualitative phases of research. The definition of the household used in this study captures the members normally living in the same house.

10. Qualitative interviews revealed that households often use revenue from off-farm activities to hire agricultural labour and increase production to, in turn, boost earnings from commercialisation of agricultural produce.

11. This observation is in line with data collected by SETSAN (Technical Secretariat for Food and Nutrition Security) in 2009 that show that 70 per cent of the respondents said that lack of human labour was the main reason for not cultivating land in the province of Cabo Delgado (World Food Programme, 2010).

12. O’Laughlin (2013) uses this terminology – ‘social costs of production’ – to refer to the externalisation of the costs of production that capitalist production imposes onto governments, civil society, markets and households. In this context, I use it to indicate that many of the social costs of production are borne by households.

13. Reliance on non-commodified production, recourse to casual wage labour, spatial and social dualism in the provisioning of health care and racialized understanding of the causes of disease are the four tendencies that O’Laughlin (2013) identifies as lying at the basis of reproduction of health inequality in southern Africa today. Due to the purposes of the discussion and relevance in the context of Cabo Delgado, I have focused on two of these tendencies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research in Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) [PhD Studentship].