Women's empowerment: the case of smallholder rice farmers in Kilombero District, Tanzania

ABSTRACT

This study examines women’s empowerment and its determinants for smallholder rice farming households in Kilombero, Tanzania. The Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is adopted and for the study site, the overall WEAI was 0.54 with a 5 Domains Empowerment sub-index value of 0.50 and the Gender Parity sub-index of 0.86. Key domains contributing to women’s disempowerment are workload, resource ownership and restricted inputs to productive decision making. To assess determinants of women’s empowerment the ordinal logit analysis is used and for the female-headed households, age of the household head, education level, group membership, condition of dwelling and distance from the nearest major town have a positive association with women’s empowerment, while monthly income has a negative association with it. For the male-headed households, the association is significant for age of the man.

KEYWORDS:

• women empowerment
• attainment
• determinants
• Tanzania

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• Q12
• R20

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Gaudiose Mujawamariya http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0087-8529

Notes

1. Agricultural productivity is defined as the value of output per hectare. The difference in this measure between male and female farmers constitutes the unconditional gender gap (World Bank, 2015).

2. Called censored because the inadequacies of the women who are not disempowered are excluded so that focus is on the disempowered (Alkire et al., 2013)

3. Rice sector Development Hubs are areas where research outputs from research activities are implemented and involve large groups of rice farmers (1000–5000) and other value chain actors such as rice millers, input dealers and traders (Wopereis et al., 2013).

4. https://www.ifpri.org/topic/weai-resource-center