Drudgery reduction, physical activity and energy requirements in rural livelihoods

Intrahousehold power inequalities and cooperation: Unpacking household responses to nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions in rural India

Nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) interventions offer a means to improve the dietary quality of rural, undernourished populations. Their effectiveness could be further increased by understanding how household dynamics enable or inhibit the uptake of NSA behaviours. We used a convergent parallel mixed-methods design to describe the links between household dynamics-specifically intrahousehold power inequalities and intrahousehold cooperation-and dietary quality and to explore whether household dynamics mediated or modified the effects of NSA interventions tested in a cluster-randomized trial, Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition (UPAVAN). We use quantitative data from cross-sectional surveys in 148 village clusters at UPAVAN's baseline and 32 months afterwards (endline), and qualitative data from family case studies and focus group discussions with intervention participants and facilitators. We found that households cooperated to grow and buy nutritious foods, and gendered power inequalities were associated with women's dietary quality, but cooperation and women's use of power was inhibited by several interlinked factors. UPAVAN interventions were more successful in more supportive, cooperative households, and in some cases, the interventions increased women's decision-making power. However, women's decisions to enter into negotiations with family members depended on whether women deemed the practices promoted by UPAVAN interventions to be feasible, as well as women's confidence and previous cultivation success. We conclude that interventions may be more effective if they can elicit cooperation from the whole household. This will require a move towards more family-centric intervention models that empower women while involving other family members and accounting for the varied ways that families cooperate and negotiate.

Participating in a Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Intervention Is Not Associated with Less Maternal Time for Care in a Rural Ghanaian District

Background

Nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) interventions may increase farm-related work for mothers, with consequences for child nutrition. The Nutrition Links (NL) intervention provided mothers with poultry, gardening inputs, technical support, and education to improve livelihoods and child nutrition outcomes in rural Ghana.

Objectives

Our objective was to compare time allocated to child care by a cross-section of mothers in the intervention group of the NL intervention with the control group (NCT01985243).

Methods

A cross-section of NL mother-child pairs was included in a time allocation substudy [intervention (NL-I) n = 74 and control (NL-C) n = 69]. In-home observations of the mother-child pair were conducted for 1 min, every 5 min, for 6 h. Observations were categorized into 4 nonoverlapping binary variables as follows: 1) maternal direct care, 2) maternal supervisory care, 3) allocare, and 4) no direct supervision. Allocare was defined as care by another person in the presence or absence of the mother. Any care was defined as the observation of maternal direct care, maternal supervisory care, or allocare. Generalized linear mixed models with binomial data distribution were used to compare the child care categories by group, adjusting for known covariates.

Results

Maternal direct care (OR = 1.07; 95% CI: 0.89, 1.28) and any care (OR = 1.56; 95% CI: 0.91, 2.67) did not differ by intervention group. However, there was a higher odds of allocare (OR = 1.36; 95% CI: 1.04, 1.79) in NL-I than in NL-C women.

Conclusions

Maternal participation in an NSA intervention was not associated with a decrease in time spent directly on child care but was associated with an increase in care from other household and community members.The clinicaltrials.gov number provided is for the main NL intervention and not this current substudy.

Oil palm and gendered time use: A mixed-methods case study from West Kalimantan, Indonesia

Measuring the social impact of oil palm requires the use of multiple metrics which capture different dimensions of well-being. To date, most studies have examined welfare outcomes at the household level, relying on a relatively narrow range of indicators. There is a need for a more diverse range of metrics to measure the social impacts of oil palm as well as more explicit accounting for study context and gendered effects. Here we demonstrate the utility of specialised time use methods used in combination with qualitative research to understand intra-household labour dynamics associated with oil palm adoption. We use a mixed-methods approach to investigate the role of smallholder oil palm plasma schemes on men and women's time use in Kapuas Hulu District, West Kalimantan. Time allocation is an important determinant of well-being as well as maternal and child nutrition and an indicator of women's empowerment and gender equality. We integrate the results from a fractional multinomial logistic regression of data from 603 individuals with qualitative findings on the subjective experience of time allocation, as well as, the causes, consequences and coping strategies to manage trade-offs in time allocation. We find that relative to non-oil-palm adopting swidden farmers, participation in oil palm plasma schemes is associated with more time spent in productive labour for both men and women, driven by off-farm labour on oil palm plantations. For women, increased time comes at the cost of reduced time spent in rest, leisure and sleep. Increased time spent in off-farm labour drives households to adapt agricultural production methods, changing cash crop production as well as accelerating swidden transitions. These changes alter gender dynamics and responsibilities within the household. Our results suggest that changes in time allocation may have significant consequences for women's well-being and gender equity. Women in the oil palm site experienced greater stress over time scarcity and employed coping strategies more frequently. Our findings indicate that time allocation could be used as an indicator of the effects of oil palm expansion and adoption on well-being and that potential effects of time scarcity on well-being, gender equity, and maternal and child nutrition should be considered by policy makers when making land use decisions.

The forgotten agriculture-nutrition link: farm technologies and human energy requirements

In the quest to reduce global under- and malnutrition, which are particularly high among smallholder farmers, agriculture-nutrition linkages are receiving increasing attention. Researchers have analyzed the link between the quantity and diversity of food that farmers produce and nutritional outcomes but paid limited attention to a third agriculture-nutrition link: the link between how food is produced and nutritional outcomes. This neglect persists despite the majority of smallholder farmers relying on hand tools for farming, which implies heavy physical work and, thus, high energy requirements. To address this research gap, this study compares the energy requirements of farm households in rural Zambia that are characterized by three different levels of mechanization: hand tools, animal drought power, and tractors. 1638 days of detailed time-use and nutrition data were collected from 186 male and female adults and boys and girls during different seasons (land preparation, weeding, and harvesting/processing) using an innovative picture-based smartphone app called “Timetracker”. This data served to calculate different proxies for physical activity and energy requirements using “Ainsworth’s Compendium of Physical Activities”. The results suggest that detailed time-use data offers great potentials to study physical activity and energy requirements. The findings show strong linkages between farm technologies, physical activity levels, and energy requirements, suggesting that this agriculture-nutrition link deserves more scientific and political attention to reduce under- and malnutrition among smallholder farmers.