updated: 19 January, 2007
IFAD
Gender
International Fund for Agricultural Development

THEME: The strategies women use for coping with their heavy workloads can have disadvantages for them and their families

Ghana-Upper-East Region Land Conservation and Smallholder Rehabilitation Project - Atoginea Akawere weaving baskets out of vetiver grass. As a member of the basket weavers' association, she received a loan from the project to buy raw materials. With the profits she is able to pay school fees and basic food items such as grain. IFAD Photo by Robert Grossman IFAD’s 1998 evaluation of the Upper-East Region Land Conservation and Smallholder Rehabilitation Project (LACOSREP) recognizes rural women’s heavy workload. According to the 1987/88 Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS), women’s time burden is about 20-25% higher than men’s. Rural women supply 80% of the labour force for harvesting, storing, processing and marketing of staple crops. They also contribute to such other agricultural tasks as weeding. In addition, women are expected to provide the vegetables and ingredients that go with the staple, collect fuel wood (with children’s help), engage in income-generating activities during the dry season and assume responsibility for household and childcare tasks. Their domestic responsibilities are often very time-consuming because of the time needed to travel to water sources, fields, stores, schools and health posts, and the lack of time-saving technology.

In the North East Region, women work both on the family farm, where the main staples of millet and sorghum are grown, and on their own plots, to cultivate groundnuts, cowpea, bambara beans, rice, millet and vegetables. When women received irrigated land under an IFAD-supported project, they took up commercial vegetable growing. Women also manage small ruminants and poultry. Because of increasing food insecurity and the need for cash for other family needs, most farm women also undertake small-scale income-generating activities, particularly during the dry season. These may be household-based processing, cutting fuel wood, beer-brewing, basket-weaving or similar activities. As formal credit became available under the IFAD-supported project, and demand was promoted among women’s groups, many women applied for small production loans. Often this meant an even greater increase in workload as the women faced the responsibilities of loan repayment, with limited support from husbands or family.

Women in rural Ghana were found to deal with the heavy workload and multiple obligations in various ways:

  • They may engage in less productive economic activities (such as charcoal selling, petty trading or keeping a table) as long as these can be done around the house. The women combine these with household responsibilities.
  • They sometimes change to less labour-intensive crops on their own plots, as from sorghum to groundnuts.
  • They may cut down on their social and public participation: women may choose not to join, or, if members, do not attend meetings of community development organizations or women’s groups, take advantage of related training or extension opportunities, or travel as frequently to visit relatives in other villages.
  • They may get their children to help them, sometimes with effects on children’s school attendance. This continues the common pattern of female illiteracy. (The literacy rate is only 18%.

The lessons for project design and implementation are obvious: women’s workloads and multiple, and often overlapping responsibilities, need to be considered by projects in order to prevent the creation of unnecessary stress for women and undesired impacts on the women and their families.

Adapted from:

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