Female farmers’ struggles and responses to COVID-19 in Ghana

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 lockdown measures exacerbated the struggles of societies with existing inequalities. Given that women are generally the most vulnerable in times of pandemics and associated economic downturns, the study seeks to understand the struggles that female farmers experienced during the COVID-19 crisis and their survival responses and livelihood enhancement. To do this, we organized six women’s focus group discussions and interviewed 145 women farmers in communities within Builsa South and Ada (in Ghana) where farming is one of the major occupations for women. The findings reveal that the pandemic severely disrupted women’s access to farm inputs, markets, and farming activities amidst the absence of COVID-19 relief funds. Consequently, female farmers had to adopt multiple alternative livelihood strategies to meet their basic needs. But, the nature of the adaptation strategy adopted depended on the intersections of gender, household characteristics and remittance flows. Female farmers from migrant households with larger household sizes temporarily migrated as an alternative livelihood strategy compared to those from non-migrant households and with smaller family sizes. This distributional consequence of COVID-19 is important for government agencies to carefully consider when forming future response policies to pandemics in general and the rural agricultural sector specifically since it has implications for food security.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• COVID-19
• female farmers
• Ghana
• Gender and intersectionality

Disclosure statement

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

Consent to participate

All informants participated voluntarily after giving their informed consent.

Ethics approval

Ethical approval was granted by the University of Ghana’s Ethics Committee for Humanities.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the University of Ghana Building a New Generation of Academics in Africa (BANGA-Africa) Project under grant number RX05, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.