Assessing multicountry programs through a “Reach, Benefit, Empower, Transform” lens

ABSTRACT Further place-based empirical research on food insecurity and masculinities is necessary, particularly in West Africa, where notions of agrarian masculinity remain entrenched and rigid gender norms dictate the division of labour and household organization. Responding to the calls for more empirical research at this nexus in rural Africa, we draw on focus group and interview data collected in the Atacora region of Benin. We find that men’s identities as household breadwinners are being undermined by worsening food insecurity, which is contributing to growing inequality in the gendered division of labour. The result is a fraught renegotiation of gender roles within the household, wherein men attempt to reassert their masculinity and dominance in the gender hierarchy through violence. By engaging in a nuanced place-based analysis, our study explains how food insecurity in subsistence farming contexts intersects with masculinities to reproduce inequality and violence against women within the household.

Masculinities in context: how food insecurity shapes conjugal dynamics in northwestern Benin

Time use, or how women and men allocate their time, is an important element of empowerment processes. To extend this area of study, this article proposes and explores the concept of time-use agency, which shifts the focus from the amount of time individuals spend on activities to the strategic choices they make about how to allocate their time. It draws on 92 semi-structured interviews from three qualitative studies in Benin, Malawi and Nigeria to explore and compare the salience of time-use agency as a component of empowerment. The article finds that time-use agency is salient among women and men and dictates how they can make and act upon strategic decisions related to how they allocate their time. It also finds that time-use agency is tied to other dimensions of agency beyond decision making and ways of exerting influence in the household. Its findings highlight that women's capacity to exercise time-use agency is conditional on gendered power dynamics and other barriers within households, which together are reciprocally related to local gender norms that dictate how women should spend their time. 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/dech.12725

Susann Anett Pedersen

Papers

Measuring Women's Empowerment: Gender and Time‐use Agency in Benin, Malawi and Nigeria