Joint Forces: The Impact of Intrahousehold Cooperation on Welfare in East African Agricultural Households
Els Lecoutere and
Bjorn Van Campenhout
Feminist Economics, 2023, vol. 29, issue 1, 266-297
Abstract:
In low- and middle-income countries, poor cooperation between members of smallholder agricultural households may lead to inefficient allocation of productive resources. This study estimates the causal mediating effects of cooperation between spouses on household welfare and public goods provision in Ugandan and Tanzanian monogamous smallholder coffee farming households. The random encouragement to participate in an intensive training program coaching couples in farming as a household enterprise and participatory intrahousehold decision making, which stimulates cooperation and, in turn, household welfare and public goods provision, enables estimating causal mediating effects while avoiding challenges of endogeneity. Spousal cooperation has positive mediating effects on household welfare, measured by total household income per capita and food security, and on household public goods provision, measured by the adoption intensity of agronomic practices and use of improved seed for food crops. Spousal cooperation has larger effects on total household income per capita with longer duration of marriage.HIGHLIGHTS In Uganda and Tanzania, the Gender Household Approach program aims to improve gender relations by promoting spousal cooperation.Participatory decision making implies strengthening women’s voice and ability to include their claims in a household.GHA presents a concept of women’s empowerment that avoids backlash by promoting shared control of resources and agency.Programs that promote spousal cooperation can improve the welfare and public goods provision of agricultural households.
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2022.2120206 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Joint forces: the impact of intrahousehold cooperation on welfare in East African agricultural households (2018) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:femeco:v:29:y:2023:i:1:p:266-297
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20
DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2022.2120206
Access Statistics for this article
Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann
More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().