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Men are poor but women are poorer: Gendered poverty and survival strategies in the Dangme West District of Ghana
Abstract
In contemporary times there has been a broader definition of poverty to include not only economic deprivation such as income, but also various forms of vulnerability such as lack of dignity and autonomy. The paper seeks to bring out the multidimensionality of poverty from the perspective of both men and women in the Dangme West District of Ghana, through their day-to-day experiences of poverty and how this leads to different livelihood strategies among men and women. It is argued that gender inequalities, the patriarchal system and the traditional gender roles of women create a situation where women's experiences of poverty tend to be more severe than those of men. The author recommends that specific policies geared towards poverty reduction must address the needs and concerns of both men and women. Thus, men and women must be involved in defining projects that reflect their local realities and this must be backed by vigorous gender sensitization and awareness programmes. Engendering poverty reduction programmes with gender sensitization and awareness programmes will go a long way to address patriarchal attitudes and gender inequalities that create poverty particularly among women.
... Traders also often transfer their trade-related knowledge, skills and starting capital to their younger kin (Desai 2009). Client networks determine how successful a trader is; having regular and loyal customers helps to make a trader's business more lucrative (Wrigley-Asante 2008). Studies have shown how communications technology, particularly mobile phones, has strengthened social ties between traders, as well as between traders and customers, whereby trust can be cultivated and the risk involved in transactions that take place over long distances (and across borders) can be reduced (Overå 2006; Wrigley-Asante and Agyemang 2019). ...
Cross-border fish trade contributes to regional food security and is a source of income for informal traders. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the activities of cross-border traders were severely affected. Lockdowns and border closures limited the movement of people and goods, hindering regional trade. The study builds on a survey using semi-structured questionnaires and in-depth interviews conducted in Ghana in 2021 and examines the impacts of the Ghana-Togo border closure on informal cross-border female fish traders’ livelihoods and food security. The findings demonstrate that despite traders’ great efforts to keep their businesses afloat, the border closure affected the traders’ mobility, trade routes, trade volumes, and incomes, which in turn negatively affected the variety and quality of their households’ diets. However, the study also documents how traders were able to implement different strategies to cope with the difficult situation by activating and extending trust-based social networks crucial for trade. The authors therefore conclude that the social embeddedness of fish traders’ informal economic activities was decisive for the resilience of the cross-border trade system during the pandemic, which at least to some degree mitigated the negative effects on traders’ livelihoods and food security.
... This link with gender may be explained by the poorer health conditions for women triggered by reproductive health challenges, resulting in relatively higher costs of health care (Dake, 2018;Gkiouleka & Huijts, 2020;Kumi-Kyereme & Amo-Adjei, 2013). Also, the traditionally gendered social roles and resource allocation manifest in higher income for men while women have the responsibility of social reproduction including daily household consumption and health expenditure (Dixon et al., 2020;Wrigley-Asante, 2008). ...
Universal health coverage is a core strategy for attaining Sustainable Development Goal 3 of ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing. Migration, like gender, is a social determinant of health and access to health insurance. Complementing recent studies on equitable access to health care, this paper examines the relationship between internal migration and access to health insurance in Ghana using a gendered lens. This study utilises data on 35302 persons (16685 men and 18617 women) aged 15 years and above from the Ghana Living Standards Survey Round 7. Using gender-stratified logit models, we assess the effects of migrant status on current health insurance enrolment adjusting for other background factors. Overall, about 56% of people are enrolled on health insurance, with higher enrolment among women (60%) than men (43%). Urban non-migrants and urban in-migrants have the highest proportions enrolled while rural in-migrants have the lowest. Apart from urban non-migrants, rural-urban migrants have a higher proportion enrolled than all other categories. Among women, rural-urban migrants are less likely than urban non-migrants to be enrolled but among men only this applies to urban-rural migrants. Rural-rural migrants are the least likely to be enrolled, compared with urban non-migrants among all groups. Internal migration is significantly associated with access to health; however, the patterns of association are different for men and women in Ghana. The findings highlight the unequal access by in-migrants to healthcare. Efforts to improve universal access to health care must strategically target migrants, using a gendered approach, to increase their health insurance coverage in Ghana.
... It is therefore instructive to indicate that the more traditionally strict gender roles and its associated behavioral prescriptions for men and women in Ghana, and among the Akan, are fast changing due to socio-political forces and structural changes such as education, globalization, civil society activities, women movement groups, technology, religion, among others (Wadei et al., 2019;Wrigley-Asante, 2008). For example, within the public space, the modern capitalist state of Ghana has introduced a more progressive female-friendly gender policies, such as increased female employment in the government sector, and increased political participation for women, aimed at increasing women's social and spatial presence. ...
Death is the commonest, incomprehensible, and inescapable reality confronting humanity in all nations and cultures. However, cultures vary in their conceptions of death, grieving and mourning rituals. Among the Akan of Ghana, mourning and funeral obsequies are essential cultural and spiritual practices. In this article, we draw insights from our reflective lived experiences and critical literature review to explore mourning and death rituals among the Akan as a stratified cultural system that reflects and reproduces broader gender patterns of masculinity and femininity in Ghana. We discuss the concept and cultural significance of mourning and bereavement practices, and further examine how socio-cultural notions of gender shape mourning and death rituals in Ghana. We argue that, as in many social and economic spaces in Ghana, funeral obsequies and bereavement practices represent sites for enacting and reproducing masculinity and femininity. The deleterious health and psychological consequences for men and women are further discussed.
... Low educational attainment decreases women's capabilities to get better employment opportunities and is accountable for deteriorating their socioeconomic living conditions (Ajala, 2016;Fabiyi & Akande, 2015). Economically deprived women fail to meet their household expenses for education, health, and other daily needs and survive under low living standards (Wrigley-Asante, 2008). Deprivation in good health restricts women from participating in different income-generating activities and creates an obstacle to caring for their family members and children's education (Delisle, 2008;Biswal et al., 2020). ...
The prominent role played by women’s empowerment and multidimensional poverty reduction in the development process is justified by including Goal-1 and Goal-5 under the 2030 agenda of UNDP’s Sustainable Development Goals. This study examines the nexus between women’s empowerment and multidimensional poverty in rural areas of the Jagatsinghpur district of Odisha. The Alkire-Foster method is used to construct Women Empowerment Index and Multidimensional Poverty Index. Education, health, economic, and standard of living dimensions construct MPI and economic, social, political, and domestic empowerment dimensions for WEI. This study observed that more than two-thirds of women are deprived of asset ownership and employment, and more than half of nutrition, access to improved sanitation, and clean energy for cooking. The results of the OLS model revealed the positive impact of women’s empowerment with occupation, age, and education in reducing multidimensional poverty. Based on the findings, the study envisages appropriate policy intervention in enhancing the educational level and generation of self-employment opportunities in empowering women and reducing multidimensional poverty.
... However, consistent with the situation in matrilineal societies in Africa, intra-household gendered power relations are more fluid than in the situation in patrilineal societies. Since women in matrilineal communities can inherit family property, they have more decision-making powers than women in patrilineal societies (Takyi and Gyimah, 2007;Wrigley-Asante, 2008). Also, since adult children in matrilineal families inherit property along their mothers' lines, their fathers may not have much power over remittances sent by such adult children. ...
This paper draws on a feminist poststructural perspective to examine gendered dimensions of sending and managing international migrant remittances in a patriarchal community in Ghana. It relies on primary data collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and observation in Nkoranza, a Ghanaian community with a long history of international migration and receipt of remittances, to analyze the fluidity of gendered and intergenerational power relationships associated with managing remittances. The findings show that males and females perform different roles as remitters and managers of remittances. While the patterns of sending and receiving remittances tend to conform to gender norms, which construct men as providers and women as carers, these subject positions are fluid. Although men are generally reluctant to perform traditional female roles even when their wives migrate, gendered and intergenerational power relations are being negotiated through the sending and management of remittances.
Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from an extensive survey of 2291 rural households in three West African countries, this article adopts normative framework based on the energy justice framework (EJF) as well as on the capability approach to identify situations of injustice with vulnerable groups and specific interventions to improve the conditions of this group. It operationalizes and discusses the concepts of availability, affordability, due process, transparency and accountability as well as sustainability with a perspective on gender equity. Accordingly, our study adopts both an ex-ante (the framework informing evidence) and an ex-post (evidence informing the framework) approach. The results show that a capability approach to energy justice requires a bottom-up, individualistic approach that allows a better identification of energy injustices. For instance, the evidence based on an original operationalization of energy availability considering opportunity costs shows that women have less access to energy and are more exposed to health problems than their male counterparts; this proposition also results in a picture showing more energy poverty than previously known. Also, their limited involvement in energy-related decision-making in the household further perpetuates the vicious cycle of time poverty, income poverty and energy poverty. Furthermore, without specific improvements in social justice for women in rural areas, increasing electricity access in rural areas is unlikely to translate into more energy justice as well as more capabilities for women; in effect, social injustices tend to block the material gains. From a policy perspective, the main recommendation focuses on women and targets the elimination of the ‘worse-case scenario’, that is, the least efficient cookstoves with fetched fuelwood for increasing the capabilities of women and improve the overall energy justice in West African countries.
Agriculture nutrition linkages have long been recognized as a potentially viable pathway of attaining food and nutrition security. However, these insights have started to influence mainstream thinking on agricultural development only recently and the empirical evidence in sub-Saharan Africa is non-conclusive. We evaluate the influence of farm production diversity on diet diversity in two semi-arid Counties of South Eastern Kenya by employing a sample of 830 smallholder farmers selected using a three-stage sampling procedure and the data were analyzed using a Poisson regression model. On the average, households consumed food from seven food groups out of the 12 possible food groups. We show that farm production diversity has a positive and significant influence on dietary diversity, a proxy for diet quality. Other interventions that can improve dietary diversity include commercialization and wealth creation. Thus, pro-farm diversification interventions are recommended as potential strategies for improving the dietary diversity of rural farming households. Moreover, improving market infrastructure to enhance commercialization and supporting wealth creation through savings and asset accumulation can contribute towards more diversified diets.
The study discusses adaptation practices and the resilience of smallholder farmers to agriculture productivity. The study sampled 248 women smallholder farmers in the study communities. Purposive sampling techniques were used to gather data from women smallholder farmers. The findings indicate that drought, pest and disease infestation, reduced rainfall, and flooding were climate change occurrences that affect crop yields as farmers record low productive output. The findings also indicate that mixed cropping, mixed farming, integrated soil fertility management and forecasting were adaptation practices. Findings further show that livelihood diversification, climate-smart agriculture (CSA), dry season gardening and improved variety were also the major resilience strategies among women smallholder farmers. The study recommends that the Ministry of Food and Agriculture should prioritize a dry season gardening support scheme for women smallholder farmers to sustain their adaptative capacity to climate change; the Nabdam District Assembly should create an enabling environment for women smallholder farmers to effectively maximum livelihood diversification; and International Non- Governmental Organization (INGO) including Action Aid Ghana (AAG) should scale-up support to women smallholder farmers in their intervention programs focusing on dry season gardening.
Keywords: Smallholder Farmer, Adaptation, Resilience, Climate Change, Climate-Smart Agriculture, Livelihood Diversification, Agriculture Productivity and Drought.
'In Transforming Traditional Agriculture (1964), Theodore Schultz argued that tiny farmers in developing countries were "efficient but poor", needing - and able to use - new technology to escape poverty. The successes of the Green Revolution have proved him half right; but why has this not reached over 800 million rural people still living on less than a dollar a day? Much-researched obstacles include: limits on the technology; deep sources of inequality by class, urban-rural location, and gender; costs, to farmers, of economic transactions, especially when the principal and the agent are different persons; gaps in, and costs of, information; and risk. This book provides a masterly review of risks facing the rural poor: sources, analytics, consequences, policy remedies - and their interactions with other obstacles to escape from poverty. Both for professionals and for graduate students with some mathematical background, this is an excellent analysis of rural risk and its links to poverty, inequality and development policy.'- Michael Lipton, Poverty Research Unit, University of Sussex, UK Throughout their lifetime, men and women are subject to a wide variety of risks, such as illness, accident, death, or less directly, unemployment, crop failure, loss of property, disability, business failure, and skill obsolescence.
First ed. publ. under the title :"India: economic development and social opportunity". Incl. bibl., index.
Poverty reduction is a priority task facing Nigeria's government today. The critical challenge, however, remains ensuring a clear understanding of the dimensions and causes of poverty at the micro level, and developing appropriate strategies to eradicate poverty. The incidence, depth and severity of poverty especially among females are such that poverty reduction strategies are synonymous with economic growth and development strategies. This paper documents and critically assesses the causes and dynamics of female poverty in Nigeria, based on data sets from a national study conducted in selected major urban centres in varying geographical and economic zones with different economic activities and population size. Qualitative data from focus group discussions with women and participatory rapid assessment methodologies are used to capture the dynamics of female poverty, highlight the dimensions of poverty, the processes of impoverishment and priorities as perceived by women themselves as they focus on their realities, needs, constraints and priorities. Appropriate policy measures flow from the findings.
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