Women's empowerment: the case of smallholder rice farmers in Kilombero District, Tanzania

Abstract

This study examines women’s empowerment and its determinants for smallholder rice farming households in Kilombero, Tanzania. The Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is adopted and for the study site, the overall WEAI was 0.54 with a 5 Domains Empowerment sub-index value of 0.50 and the Gender Parity sub-index of 0.86. Key domains contributing to women’s disempowerment are workload, resource ownership and restricted inputs to productive decision making. To assess determinants of women’s empowerment the ordinal logit analysis is used and for the female-headed households, age of the household head, education level, group membership, condition of dwelling and distance from the nearest major town have a positive association with women’s empowerment, while monthly income has a negative association with it. For the male-headed households, the association is significant for age of the man.