Intra-household gender disparity: Evidence from crop farmers in Malawi

Abstract

Women contribute a significant share to agricultural development and the role of information in enhancing agricultural development cannot be over-emphasized. However, rural women remain largely neglected by information and service providers failing to address their differing needs in access to and control over resources, as is evident in the lack of gender-sensitive policy interventions across Lower Income Countries (LICs) and Lower Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). This paper contributes to the agricultural economics literature in our understanding of gender disparity by focusing on intrahousehold gender differences in terms of agency and Access to Information (A2I). We employed primary data from 256 households from two villages in the Mchinji district in Malawi. Our preliminary data analysis indicates that: 1. incidences of observed difference in the agency are statistically different between men and women; and 2. both men and women reported to have limited A2I in rural Malawi, but only in terms of accessing information through radio or TV, their difference is statistically significant. The next step of the analysis would focus on the associations between A2I and agency to understand how the inclusion of AI2 as a dimension is crucial in improving the measures of women empowerment and agriculture development.