Bargaining within the household is often hidden, involving emotional manipulations and unspoken power games that may not be readily detectable or fundamentally threatening (Locke & Okali, 1999, p-275).
In response to the problems posed by a unitary conceptualization of the household, economists have proposed alternative household models. These models, especially those embodying the bargaining approach, provide a useful framework for analyzing gender relations (Agarwal, 1997). Research based on these models indicates that increased resources (earnings) in the hands of women may generate egalitarian shifts in gender relations, by enhancing women`s intra-household bargaining power (e.g. Adato, et al., 2000, Mahmud, Shah, & Becker, 2011, …show more content…
Smallholder market integration is one of the crucial features of the plan and the dairy sector is the target of the commercialization policy in the country. In Ethiopia, dairy has traditionally been a women`s business. Women were responsible for milking cows and for processing milk into butter, cottage cheese and yoghurt, for household consumption as well as for the local market. The dairy market surplus has been an important source of income for Ethiopian rural women. However, with the integration of smallholder milk production into the formal market system this may have changed. The experience of other African countries indicates that cash crops and their benefits tend to be controlled by males (see Fischer & Qaim, 2012, Abbas 1997, Nijuk, 2011 and Endeley, 2001). Given that in market participant households dairy is considered more as cash commodity, the shift towards a market-oriented system may involve a shift of the control over milk income from women to …show more content…
Using the information obtained in quasi-experimental games, a household survey and qualitative information collected from key informants and post-game interviews, we aim to answer the following research question: What is the relationship between milk-market participation of dairy farm households and women’s intra-household bargaining power in Ethiopia?
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides the theoretical model and a description of the quasi-experimental design. Section 3 is devoted to data collection, sampling and analytical procedures. Section 4 present empirical results and in section 5 the findings are summarized and
In response to the problems posed by a unitary conceptualization of the household, economists have proposed alternative household models. These models, especially those embodying the bargaining approach, provide a useful framework for analyzing gender relations (Agarwal, 1997). Research based on these models indicates that increased resources (earnings) in the hands of women may generate egalitarian shifts in gender relations, by enhancing women`s intra-household bargaining power (e.g. Adato, et al., 2000, Mahmud, Shah, & Becker, 2011, …show more content…
Smallholder market integration is one of the crucial features of the plan and the dairy sector is the target of the commercialization policy in the country. In Ethiopia, dairy has traditionally been a women`s business. Women were responsible for milking cows and for processing milk into butter, cottage cheese and yoghurt, for household consumption as well as for the local market. The dairy market surplus has been an important source of income for Ethiopian rural women. However, with the integration of smallholder milk production into the formal market system this may have changed. The experience of other African countries indicates that cash crops and their benefits tend to be controlled by males (see Fischer & Qaim, 2012, Abbas 1997, Nijuk, 2011 and Endeley, 2001). Given that in market participant households dairy is considered more as cash commodity, the shift towards a market-oriented system may involve a shift of the control over milk income from women to …show more content…
Using the information obtained in quasi-experimental games, a household survey and qualitative information collected from key informants and post-game interviews, we aim to answer the following research question: What is the relationship between milk-market participation of dairy farm households and women’s intra-household bargaining power in Ethiopia?
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides the theoretical model and a description of the quasi-experimental design. Section 3 is devoted to data collection, sampling and analytical procedures. Section 4 present empirical results and in section 5 the findings are summarized and