Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa Longitudinal Perspectives from Six Countries

Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa uses a longitudinal cross-country comparative approach to contribute to the understanding of smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Relying on unique household level data collected in six African countries since 2002, it addresses the dynamics of intensification and diversification within and outside agriculture in contexts where women have much poorer access to agrarian resources than men.

Despite a growing interest in smallholder agriculture in Africa, this interest has not been matched by the research on the subject. While recent policies focus on reducing poverty through encouraging smallholder agriculture, there are few studies showing how livelihoods have changed since this time, and especially how such changes may have affected male and female headed households differently. Moreover, agriculture is often viewed in isolation from other types of income generating opportunities, like small scale trading. Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa looks at how livelihoods have changed over time and how this has affected the relationship between agricultural and non-agricultural sources of livelihoods. In general, women have much poorer access to agricultural sources of income, and for this reason the interplay between farm and non-farm sources of income is especially important to analyse.

Providing suggestions for more inclusive policies related to rural development, this edited volume outlines current weaknesses and illustrates potential opportunities for change. It offers a nuanced alternative to the current dominance of structural transformation narratives of agricultural change through adding insights from gender studies as well as village-level studies of agrarian development. It positions change in relation to broader livelihood dynamics outside the farm sector and contextualises them nationally and regionally to provide a necessary analytical adaption to the unfolding empirical realities of rural Africa.

Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt is Team Leader of the Afrint group, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from six research institutions in Africa, and the Departments of Human Geography, Statistics, Sociology and Economic History at Lund University. Agnes' research interests focus on rural based processes of transformation within and outside agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa involving changing rural and multi-spatial livelihoods, gender based access to productive resources within and outside agriculture, consumption, and intra-household division of labor and income. She uses a mixed-methods approach combining the use of panel level data from the Afrint database with qualitative field work at the individual, household, and village level.

Fred Mawunyo Dzanku is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana. His interests span a range of research areas including the economics of rural households, applied econometric modelling, agricultural production economics, food security, and project impact evaluation. He has extensive experience in the implementation of household surveys, and multi-country longitudinal surveys in rural areas of developing countries including Mali, Uganda, and Ghana.

Aida Cuthbert Isinika is currently based at the Institute of Continuing Education at the Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania. Her research interests include production economics, resource use efficiency, value chain analysis, land tenure studies, and development and rural development in general. Under the Afrint research project, Aida has led the Tanzanian research team since 2002, and has edited two Afrint publications.

1. Introduction- theoretical and methodological framing of the book, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Isinika
2. African smallholder farmers on the move: farm and non-farm trends for six sub-Saharan African countries, 2002-2015, Magnus Jirstrom, Maria Archila Bustos, and Sarah Alobo Loison
3. Assets, gender, and rural livelihoods, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt
4. Gender and rural livelihoods: agricultural commercialization and farm non-farm diversification, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt
5. Agrarian change and structural transformation: drivers and distributional outcomes, Goran Djurfeldt, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Ola Hall, and Maria Archila Bustos
6. Agricultural intensification response to agricultural input subsidies in Tanzania: a spatial-temporal and gender perspective 2002-2015, Elibariki Msuya, Aida Isinika, and Fred Mawunyo Dzanku
7. Intensification, crop diversification and gender relations in Malawi, Peter Mvula and Wapulumuka Mulwafu
8. Policies or prices? A gendered analysis of drivers of maize production in Malawi and Zambia, 2002-2013, Ellen Hillbom and Martin Prowse
9. Spatial and gendered linkages between non-farm diversification and farm productivity in Ghana, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku and Daniel Bruce Sarpong
10. Technology use, gender, and impact of non-farm income on agricultural investment: an empirical analysis of maize production in two regions of Kenya, Stephen K. Wambugu, Joseph T. Karugia , and Willis O. Kosura
11. Gender, Agriculture, and Diversification in Rural Africa: What Lessons Can We Learn?, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Isinika