Participants in this workshop reviewed and discussed findings from the research project‚ Policies for Sustainable Land Management in the Highlands of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, begun in January 1998, and from other related research being conducted in the highlands of Tigray by Mekelle University and its collaborators.

In rural areas of Bangladesh, poverty is pervasive and associated with high rates of malnutrition, especially among preschool children and women. Apart from low levels of energy intakes, it is increasingly recognized that rice-dominated diets such as those consumed by most poor in the countryside may not supply all micronutrients required for a healthy life and productive activities. Children and women are particularly vulnerable to these micronutrient deficiencies because they face relatively higher requirements for growth and reproduction.

With increasing urbanization, the percentage of women participating in the labor force and the percentage of households headed by single mothers have increased. Reliable and affordable child-care alternatives are thus becoming increasingly important in urban areas. The Hogares Comunitarios Program (HCP) was established in Guatemala City in 1991 as a direct response to the increasing need of poor urban dwellers for substitute childcare.

Before 1994 the policy of apartheid in South Africa had systematically denied the majority of the population access to resources through legal restrictions on mobility, property rights, and residential location (Thompson 1990). South African industry fulfilled labor requirements in key industries largely using migrant laborers—mostly men—who worked in one place while their families resided elsewhere.

One in every three preschool-aged children living in developing countries is malnourished. This disturbing yet preventable state of affairs causes untold suffering and, given its wide scale, is a major obstacle to the development process itself. Volumes have been written about the causes of child malnutrition and the actions that can be taken to reduce it— ranging from community-based feeding programs to accelerated economic growth (Smith and Haddad 2000).

Much empirical work has approached the problem of how resource allocations are made within households from the perspective that if preferences differ, welfare outcomes depend on the power of individuals to exert their own preferences. Measures of power are therefore a central component of quantitative empirical approaches to understanding how different preferences translate into different welfare outcomes. Following most of the empirical studies in this genre, this chapter focuses on dynamics within couples.

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).

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).

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.

Reduction of rural poverty is one of the greatest challenges the Government of Nepal faces. Since most of the country’s agricultural production is semi-subsistence-oriented, increased commercialization of this rural-based economy is essential for poverty reduction and economic growth. Consequently, farm output diversification and productivity improvements are high-priority areas for the government.

The bargaining power of men and women crucially shapes the resource allocation decisions households make (Quisumbing and de la Brière 2000). Husbands and wives often use their bargaining power to express different priorities about how resources should be allocated. Understanding these differences and their effects is critical if policymakers are to improve livelihoods. Increasing the bargaining power of one gender group rather than another can mean the difference between policy failure and policy success.

Agrowing body of literature suggests that men and women allocate resources under their control in systematically different ways.