Among financial institutions serving poor households around the world, microfinance programs have emerged as important players. These programs typically make small loans—sometimes as small as US$50 to US$100 and sometimes as large as several thousand dollars-to households lacking access to formal-sector banks (see, for example, Lapenu and Zeller 2001). One important achievement of the microfinance movement has been its relative success in deliberately reaching out to poor women living in diverse socioeconomic environments.

Since 1997 Mexico has provided poor families with cash benefits linked to children’s school attendance and regular clinic attendance, as well as in-kind health benefits and nutritional supplements, through the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA). Unlike previous social programs in Mexico, this nationwide antipoverty program targets transfers to the mother of the family.

Many decisions that affect the well-being of individuals are made within families or households. The processes by which resources are allocated among individuals and the outcomes of those processes are commonly referred to as “intrahousehold resource allocation.” Since the early 1990s a growing literature has paid increasing attention to the role that intrahousehold resource allocation plays in affecting the outcome of development policy (see Strauss and Thomas 1995; Behrman 1997; Haddad, Hoddinott, and Alderman 1997 for reviews).

The previous sections have highlighted the importance of assets as a determinant of bargaining power within marriage. Both formal and informal institutions underlie asset accumulation and provide the basis for property rights. When women face social and legal restrictions in acquiring certain forms of assets, such as land, they may resort to accumulating other “assets” and investing in other forms of capital.

The concept of social capital, well grounded in the sociological and anthropological literatures (for example, Coleman 1988), is increasingly being analyzed and used by economists and other development policy practitioners. The entry point for many economists is Robert Putnam’s research on Italian regional economic performance (Putnam 1993) and his subsequent work in the United States. For Putnam, “social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam 1995, 67).

Much has been written about the importance of gender issues in designing and implementing agricultural evelopment projects (Cloud 1983; Alderman et al. 1994; Quisumbing et al. 1998). Part of this literature has been motivated by the important role that women play in food production, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (Boserup 1970; Dixon 1982; Gladwin and Macmillan 1989), as well as in the management of natural resources (Meinzen-Dick et al. 1997).

Pervasive poverty and undernutrition persist in Bangladesh. About half the country’s 130 million people cannot afford an adequate diet. Poverty has kept generations of families from sending their children to school, and without education their children’s future will be a distressing echo of their own. Furthermore, from birth, children from poor families are often deprived of the basic nutritional building blocks that they need to learn easily. Consequently, the pathway out of poverty is restricted for children from poor families.

There is renewed interest in the intrahousehold allocation of welfare, particularly among economists studying poor countries where even slight differences in the allocation of household resources can have dramatic consequences on child and female nutrition, morbidity, and mortality (Haddad and Hoddinott 1994; Rose 1999; Dercon and Krishnan 2000). The evidence collected so far tends to demonstrate that the allocation of consumption and leisure among household members varies systematically with their relative contributions to household total income (Thomas 1990; Alderman et al.

Gender differences in health and nutrition have long been a subject of study in the intrahousehold allocation literature. Unlike consumption expenditures or farm production, measurements of health and nutritional outcomes are always at the individual level, and thus factors that underlie systematic differences in outcomes—such as age, gender, and position within the household—are more readily apparent.

"To end hunger and prevent the recurrence of famine and starvation, we need to take the following steps: invest in public health, child nutrition, education, women’s and girls’ social status, and other components of human capital; reform public institutions and create innovative funding and partnership arrangements; change government policies at all levels to be both pro-poor and pro-growth; increase funding for scientific and technological research to boost agricultural production and efficiency; and develop specific policies and institutions to deal with environmental degradation caused

This book synthesizes IFPRI's recent work on the role of gender in household decisionmaking in developing countries, provides evidence on how reducing gender gaps can contribute to improved food security, health, and nutrition in developing countries, and gives examples of interventions that actually work to reduce gender disparities. It is an accessible, easy-to-read synthesis of the gender research that IFPRI has undertaken in the 1990s.

The collective model of the household predicts that bargaining power determines the share of resources allocated to an individual within the household. The concept of bargaining power is elusive, however. It is perhaps useful at this point to outline the possible determinants of bargaining power, while not making any claims to measure power itself.