Smallholder farming is an important way to sustain a livelihood for households in sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure food security of a growing population with increasingly complex dietary demands, these smallholder household farms will need to produce in a sustainably more efficient manner. At the same time, there is a need to reduce inequalities linked to gender, not only for the benefit of women and their families, but also for future sustainable agricultural development and poverty reduction. There is a growing recognition that some of the challenges to sustainable, efficient and equitable outcomes of smallholder farming are situated at the level of the household.
The research project randomly encouraged an intervention introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making in smallholder coffee farming households in Uganda and Tanzania. This enabled assessing the extent to which the effective participation of both spouses in rule- and decision-making about the household farm management contributes to more equitable, efficient and sustainable household farming; hypotheses which are inferred from insights into solutions for collective action challenges that arise with the management of common pool resources.
First, in terms of intrahousehold equity and women’s empowerment, participatory intrahousehold decision-making increased women’s personal asset ownership and women’s involvement in strategic household decisions which gives women a highly valued sense of subjective agency and allows them to contribute their household’s development. Women’s priority of sharing control over the income from coffee with their husband was attained to some degree; greater transparency over coffee income was not.
Secondly, in terms of the impact on efficient and sustainable agriculture-related household choices: There is a positive impact on the joint management of food and cash crops, on the production of food crops with relatively certain harvests and consumable cash crops, and on the adoption of sustainable intensification practices for coffee and food production. Total livestock income went up, income from coffee decreased less than in other households, and households’ wellbeing and food security improved as a result of the intervention.
Thirdly, improved cooperation, induced by the encouraged intervention promoting participatory intrahousehold decision-making, has positive effects on household income per capita, household food security, and investment in agricultural production.
Fourthly, participatory intrahousehold decision-making stimulated cooperative and generous sharing behaviour, measured my means of a lab-in-the-field experiment, among cooperative and generous types of husbands and wives; but reduced cooperation and generosity among less cooperative, less generous types. Men of the less cooperative –generous – type, however, became more cooperative and more generous with intensive coaching.
Realizing impact on the equity, efficiency and sustainability of household farming by introducing participatory intrahousehold decision-making, however, may have been still constrained by the structural, deeply rooted customs and norms governing the mode of operation in agricultural households that it challenged; and may require a longer time frame for the interventions to result in more measurable changes.
