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ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the link between gender differences and different activities along the cowpea value chain as well as food security and asset-based poverty using a recent cross-sectional data set of over 120 farm households in Eastern Zambia. We used the endogenous switching probit regression model to account for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. Results show that women’s participation in the cowpea value chain significantly increases cowpea production, marketing and adoption of improved cowpea varieties. It also reduces both food insecurity and poverty. However, women’s participation in the value chain is limited by low levels of education, access to extension, credit, village markets, and improved agricultural technologies. Policies to address these constraints that limit women’s participation in the cowpea value chain have the potential to reduce gender disparities, food insecurity, and poverty.
Notes
1. Cowpea production and marketing is a valid focus; however, we acknowledge that gender relations may be influenced by many other factors.
2. We used asset based poverty and following Igbalajobi et al. (Citation2013), a relative asset poverty line was calculated as two-thirds of the mean per capita total household asset ownership.
3. Men, and some women, who did not participate in any of the activities in the cowpea value chain were defined as non-participants.
4. We also estimated propensity score matching (PSM) for robustness check. To conserve space, we did not present theoretical and empirical specifications of PSM.
5. Results on descriptive statistics by sex of the household head are excluded from the main paper as they do not provide a gender analysis (Doss & Kieran, Citation2014). However, they are presented as supplementary material.
6. We are grateful to one of reviewers for suggesting the inclusion of additional variables, such as age of the women, in the estimation of the model.
7. We thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting to estimate PSM in order to check sensitivity of our results.
8. Full ESPR estimation results are not presented, but they are available upon request.
9. We did not estimate the effect on value addition because the sample size was too small.