THEME: Rural women are increasing their contribution to household food access through growing food and earning income to buy food.

IFAD’s 1998 evaluation of the Upper-East Region Land Conservation and Smallholder Rehabilitation Project (LACOSREP) recognizes that in Ghana, as in much of the rest of the world, women are increasing their contribution to household food security. Rural women do this either by growing food or by earning income to purchase food. Usually they try to both because of urgent needs. Household food insecurity is a seasonal problem in some parts of Ghana, such as the north, occurring every year between February and July.

A 1998 IFAD study in the Upper East Region of Ghana found that the bulk of the rural household budget (over 75%) is spent on food. A major reason for this high spending on food is the poverty and food scarcity cycle: poorer households are forced by necessity and lack of storage to sell their crops soon after harvest, when prices are lowest. During the dry season, they have to buy them back as food at a time when prices are at their highest. In order to generate the cash needed for this, the poorer farmers, sometimes including women and children, have to work for others. Women tend to take up off-farm income-generating activities to help feed their families. One impact is that, because of urgent cash needs, both men and women sometimes have to neglect their own fields at the beginning of the rains for lack of time. The result is a poor harvest. Poverty therefore becomes a downward spiral, with women assuming an increasingly heavy workload and greater responsibility for household food security.

In agriculture, women pitch in wherever and whenever they can. The IFAD study found that they even undertook low-profit activities that the men rejected (such as sesame or coffee-harvesting when market prices were low) as long as they contributed something to feed their families. The regional pattern of marked dry spells and peak-season floods has resulted in seasonal food shortages and inter-annual food insecurity. In times of poor harvest, women are assuming a greater and greater burden. Traditionally, women were supposed to grow or generate the cash to buy the ingredients that go with staple crops such as millet and sorghum. These are grown on the household plots, to which women also contribute labour. Common foods that women traditionally grow themselves are groundnuts, cowpeas, bambara beans and vegetables. The groundnuts are mostly sold (70%). Women now sometimes also grow food such as millet and rice on their "own" plots. That is, on land that their husbands have allocated for their wives’ use. Lack of water is often a major constraint for vegetable-growing during the dry season. Even ethnic groups that once thought they should not farm (such as the Sissala of the Upper West Region), are now farming.

Processing gathered products is a common income-generating activity in the north. Such products include medical herbs, wood, charcoal, roots and wild leaves and fruits. Gathering shea nuts can account for up to 60% of rural women’s cash income. The women from the most food insecure families sell the nuts immediately for cash, thus losing out on getting the higher earnings that could come from their turning the nuts into shea butter, particularly later in the year, when prices are ten times higher. The rest of women’s non-farm income usually comes from processing and selling small quantities of crops, petty trading, handicrafts and brewing beer (non-Muslims). In recent years, more women are also entering seasonal or long-term migration to earn income. This used to be a matter of shame, but attitudes about it have now changed. Not only does migration take pressure off the family food supply, but it also results in occasional remittances.

When analysing how men and women allocate their incomes, studies in Ghana have found that women spend the largest proportion of their income on food for their families, followed by health expenditures and expenses of other household items and inputs. The foods the women tend to buy are not only items such as oil and salt. They may also purchase supplementary millet and other staples, and buy vegetables when they themselves have not grown enough of these.

Studies have found that for many poor women in Ghana, food security is as good as cash income. Some women’s enterprises actually pay the women involved in food, either by buying food for each member of the group, or paying the women members with a portion of the food produced by the group. This way, the women’s households are sure to benefit from the women’s efforts, and the cash earned is not diverted to other, non-essential expenses.

In Ghana, as elsewhere, promoting women’s on or off-farm productive activities can make a direct contribution to household food supply. As always, however, programmes will need to take women’s multiple responsibilities and time constraints into account. Understanding the poverty and hunger cycle and survival strategies is important for finding best ways of supporting women’s productive activities.

Adapted from:

IFAD - Office of Evaluation and Studies. 1998. Ghana: LACOSREP I, Mid-term Evaluation Report. Rome. July.