Time Poverty Among Women Smallholders in Ghana

PI: Leland Glenna

Co-PIs: Janelle Larson, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos

Partner Country and Collaborators: Ghana, Savannah Agricultural Research Institute (SARI)

Funding Source: USAID Feed the Future Peanut Innovation Lab (University of Georgia)

Peanut production in Ghana has the potential to improve the lives of women and others in smallholder households. The crop is widely grown, drought resistant, and in demand, but poor seeds, limited input use, loss to pests and disease, limited access to technology, and lack of financing for inputs and labor limit productivity (Martey et al. 2015). Women are the primary producers and processors of peanuts. However, men generally make decisions about marketing and the use of income from peanuts (Ragsdale et al. 2018, Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2017). It is also a labor-intensive crop, with time constraints at critical points in production (Martey et al. 2015). This is relevant because women are likely to be time poor in Ghana (Nyanzu, 2017).

With funding from USAID's Feed the Future Peanut Innovation Lab, Penn State and the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute (SARI) partner on a 3.5-year project in Ghana to study women's time poverty (defined as insufficient time to take on new tasks and responsibilities) and its influence on women's participation in the peanut value chain, and to develop and evaluate strategies to enhance that participation. Specifically, the project pursues four objectives: 1) We will measure women's and men's time use (focusing on women) and expand the understanding of time poverty in relation to peanut production; 2) We will inventory time-saving and time-enhancing technologies and, using focus groups to evaluate the technologies and gender-integrated farmer field schools as the key outreach mechanism, we will disseminate those technologies with the greatest promise of enhancing women's participation in peanut production; 3) We will measure whether the interventions enhance women's capacity to participate in the peanut value chain and, thereby, household wellbeing; and 4) To build capacity at SARI. The goal of the project is to empower women and enhance their and their families' economic wellbeing.