Land is an important asset for rural households, and having secure land rights is important for poverty reduction. Despite the large body of literature on the relationship between land tenure security, livelihoods, and poverty, most of this literature is based on household-level data and does not consider possible intrahousehold inequalities in land ownership.
We use data from the 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey to examine the relationship between women’s status and nutrition in Bangladesh using indicators of empowerment such as mobility, decisionmaking power, and attitudes toward verbal and physical abuse. We also examine the role of variables reflecting maternal education and height, in relation to child nutrition. All models control for age and sex of the child, household wealth, and region.
This paper starts by reflecting on the concept and measurement of women’s empowerment and then reviews some of the structural interventions that aim to influence underlying gender norms in society and eradicate gender discrimination. It then proceeds to review the evidence of the impact of three types of interventions—cash transfer programs, agricultural interventions, and microfinance programs—on women’s empowerment, nutrition, or both.
The objectives of this paper are to help build a picture of the role of women in China’s agriculture, to assess whether or not agricultural feminization has been occurring, and if so, to measure its impact on productivity. To meet these goals, we rely on three datasets that allow us to explore who is working on China’s farms and the effects of the labor allocation decisions of rural households on productivity. We find that since 2000, the role of women has increased both in the supply of farm labor and in the duties that women take on in the management of farms.
Urban open spaces are valued for their health, social, economic, and environmental benefits. Outdoor physical activity is important for the wellbeing of youth, while playfulness is crucial for creativity and innovation. It is observed that in Pakistan the access of adolescent girls to public open spaces and school playgrounds is restricted, but there has been no prior scientific study. This research has studied the impediments in four planned and un-planned localities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The restrictions on girls are pervasive and become more severe upon their attaining puberty.
This paper analyzes how women’s participation affects institutional outcomes related to the decentralized governance of community forests in Madhya Pradesh, India. The analysis is based on data from a representative sample of 641 cases of joint forest management, India’s flagship program to involve communities in forest governance. We focus on two outcomes relevant for local livelihoods: control of illicit grazing and control of illicit felling in the forest.
This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste to calculate five indicators: incidence of ownership by sex; distribution of ownership by sex; and distribution of plots, mean plot size, and distribution of land area, all by sex of owner.
Although there is ample evidence of differences in how and where men and women acquire information, most research on learning and household decisionmaking only considers access to information for a single, typically male, household head. This assumption may be problematic in developing-country agriculture, where women play a fundamental role in farming. Using gender-disaggregated social network data from Uttar Pradesh, India, we analyze agricultural information networks among men and women.
Book chapter
This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the impact of Helen Keller International’s Enhanced-Homestead Food Production pilot program in Burkina Faso on women’s and men’s assets and on norms regarding ownership, use, and control of those assets. Even though men continue to own and control most land and specific assets in the study area, women’s control over and ownership of assets has started to change, both in terms of quantifiable changes as well as changes in people’s perceptions and opinions about who can own and control certain assets.
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