1) The persistence of poverty in Tanzania despite economic growth is partly due to changing gender dynamics as traditional roles dissolve with new economic opportunities. 2) Men are migrating or moving into traditionally female crops and activities as cash crops decline, while responsibilities increasingly fall to women. 3) Rising costs are intensifying poverty as effectively and fully female-headed households struggle with lack of support and dispossession of assets, though some women organize support networks.

1. Evolution of Gender and Poverty
Dynamics in Tanzania
Flora Kessy
Conference on Lessons from a Decade’s Research
on Poverty
Pretoria, South Africa
16-18 March 2016

2. Introduction
• In 1999, Deborah Bryceson argued:
“Liberalisation and de-agrarianisation have
led to a ‘scramble of non farm work’ and
process of individualisation of economic
activity, dissolving traditional gendered
roles, economic rights, and maintenance
responsibilities within rural households.”

3. Poverty Dynamics
• There is more than 10 years of attempt to
reduce poverty in the context of relatively
high growth rate - 6% - 8% (which is higher for
Africa)
• Despite a series of poverty reduction
strategies (PRSP, MKUKUTA I, MKUKUTA II)
there is minimal reduction of level of poverty
- fell only from 39% (2001) to 38% (2007) and
33% (2012) in rural areas.

4. Main Question
• Why didn’t fairly healthy growth in Tanzania
corresponds to a fall in poverty?
• We look at the effects of the recent decade of
poverty reduction on women’s rights on:
– Evolving roles of men and women (livelihoods)
– Rights and responsibilities of rural men and
women (the change in conjugal rights).

5. The Argument
• Persistence of poverty is the effect of unequal
rural growth and the scramble for jobs among
poor men and women on the norms
governing traditional gender roles,
responsibilities and rights (gender dynamics)
– Changing gender dynamics in the context of
‘hardship of life’ contributes in deepening poor
people’s inability to move out of poverty.

6. Defining Gender Dynamics
• Gender dynamics are defined as:
– Who does what work (family/household division of
labour)? How much?
– How is responsibility for family maintenance
(including education and health care costs) shared
between men and women?
– Who has what rights—freedom to be employed,
mobility and control over earned and joint income—
to family assets?
– Who has power over people: (1) power in the
household or clan and (2) enforcing legal rights within
the larger community?

7. Methods
• The paper draws from approximately 120 case
studies interview, focus group discussions, and
and 60 key informant interviews as part of
Qunt-Qual (Q2) Chronic Poverty Research
Center (CPRC) study in Tanzania
• Conducted in 3 districts in rural Tanzania
• Household were drawn from a Sub-sample of
the Tanzania National Panel Survey.

8. Contesting Gender Dynamics in the
Context of ‘the Hardship of Life’
• Traditional gender relations are being contested fiercely in
the context of a scramble for jobs, increasing land scarcity
and rising costs—what study participants often refer to as
‘the hardship of life’.
• Men and women are contesting on who does what work,
who has what share of the responsibility for family
maintenance and who has what rights over assets, power
and social protection in kin networks.
• A shift in responsibility for family provisioning onto women
in the context of rapidly rising costs relative to earnings and
their falling rights over assets and to kin social protection is
intensifying their own poverty and that of their
dependants.

9. De-masculinisation of Traditionally Male
Rural Livelihoods
• Reduction in the farming of traditional
agricultural exports has led to movement into
other crops - paddy, maize, cassava, pulses etc.
(traditionally women crops).
• Decline in income from cash-cropping has also
been replaced by a rise in income from local off-
farm employment and men migration
• Fall in support for local cash-cropping has
resulted to a rise in men’s migration in search of
work (reverse gender division of labour)
– Men’s migration can become permanent as they find
new wives and fail to return home.

10. The Rise of “Effectively” Female-Headed
Households
• Female headedness is rather difficult to capture given its fluidity:
women drift in and out of marriage through successive divorces and
widowhood.
– However, their responsibility for provisioning is constant (supplying
food and clothing, primary school educational costs, health costs for
themselves in pregnancy and for young children and water costs).
• Three key drivers are behind the rise of “effectively” female-headed
households.
– Male chronic illness, usually resulting from HIV and AIDS-related
diseases
– Male despair/giving up resulting from chronic underemployment and
from rising barriers to escape from poverty (despair can promote
refuge in alcohol and mistresses)
– Semi-permanent migration – no remittances are sent home
(preceding abandonment).

11. The Rise of Fully Female-Headed
Households
• Permanent migration: men are leaving women to farm and
bring up dependants on their own in a context of rapidly
rising costs.
• Platteau et al. (2005) argument for sub-Saharan Africa as a
whole applies here:
“The management of agricultural households in sub-Saharan Africa has
progressively become women’s responsibility as men migrate to other
regions for better economic opportunities, and as the HIV & AIDS
pandemic takes its toll. Land becomes even more important for women
to be able to provide a living to their families, especially when the
husband and the other male members of the family die; and other
opportunities for income are scarce,” p.1
• Another key factor promoting the rise of fully female-
headed households is widowhood and gender based
violence.

12. Other Forces Rallying Against Women’s Ability
to Provide for their Households
• Dispossession of productive capital and other property
(farms, homes, livestock, etc.) – some women are
serially dispossessed (divorced then widowed).
• Enforcement of women’s statutory rights to marital
property is inadequate
• Women’s own traditional male sources of support are
less dependable (fathers and brothers do not always
welcome widows and divorcees back)
– Traditional responsibilities to provide social protection are
being actively contested.
• For the newly single mother, land is expensive and
services (especially education and water) are becoming
unaffordable.

13. How Do Female-Headed Households
Manage Poverty?
• Involvement in trade;
– For most poor women their income is based on a
rise in casual farm labour and petty production
and trade
• Organization into highly disciplined and largely
female networks based on social support, credit,
petty production and sale:
– Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOS)
– Village Community Banks (VICOBA).

14. How Can Policy Expand on Women’s
Efforts?
• Policy to promote women’s rights, knowledge,
power and assets must be linked to a solution for
poor men in form of employment creation
– Explore employment avenues for rural households – in
and outside agriculture
• Building the competences in SACCOS and VICOBA
– Strengthening the functionality of various funds e.g. the
Presidential Trust Fund
• Enforcement and expansion of women’s legal rights
to land.

15. Asanteni Sana!!
Thanks!!