Piecework (Ganyu) as an Indicator of Household Vulnerability in Rural Zambia

Abstract

Piecework (ganyu) is short-term, casual labor common in rural Zambia and neighboring countries. Reliance on piecework as a strategy to cope during food shortages in the rainy/cultivation season can restrict own-farm production, and thus, is regarded as an indicator of a household's vulnerability to food insecurity. Based on a household's level of participation in piecework, we explore this claim in rural Zambia using survey data collected during the rainy and dry seasons in 2009. We argue that seasonal assessments are essential if such dependence on piecework is used as a robust measure of a household's vulnerability to food insecurity.

Keywords:

• coping strategies
• food insecurity
• piecework
• seasonality
• vulnerability
• Zambia

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first author was awarded a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (Grant number: 0792891) and a University of Arizona Graduate College Dissertation Fellowship to fund the research for this study. A draft of this manuscript was presented at the 2011 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Montreal, Canada. The authors wish to thank Ivy Pike, Deborah Crooks, Nicholas Sitko, and the three anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Any errors are the responsibility of the authors.

Notes

¹ People living in a village, for example, may form a group to raise cash to purchase the inputs required to construct a well or a religious group can do piecework in order to buy building materials to improve a structure in which they congregate. Rarely do people pool their labor, however, to meet their individual food needs.

² Thirty-six households exclusively supplied labor in the rainy season. However, in order to determine whether a household supplied piecework in both seasons or only in the rainy or the dry season knowledge about their piecework status in the dry season is necessary. This information obviously does not exist for the two households who moved from the study setting prior to the second wave of survey interviews, and therefore, they were dropped from these analyses.

³ Dried maize is first milled into maize-meal. Maize-meal is then used to cook the staple food, nsima.