Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) affects more than 3.5 people in the developing world. More than half of pregnant women (56 percent) and 44 percent of nonpregnant women are anemic (ACC/SCN 2000). IDA contributes to approximately 20 percent of maternal deaths in Africa and Asia (Ross and Thomas 1996). In Africa alone, some 20,000 maternal deaths per year could be prevented with anemia treatment.

This study examines the implications of gender differences in wealth transfers—farmland and education—on the lifetime incomes of men and women in the rural areas of Ghana, the Philippines, and Sumatra. Based on household surveys of three generations, we tested the hypothesis that parents bequeath their wealth to their sons and daughters in accordance with their comparative advantages in lowland and upland farming and in nonfarm jobs.

The devolution of natural resource management responsibility from the state to communities or local user groups has become a widespread trend that cuts across countries and resource sectors. Unlike claims to the contrary in policy narratives, devolution of control over resources from the state to local organizations does not necessarily lead to greater participation and empowerment of all stakeholders (Cleaver 1999).

Mexico’s Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) is a major government program aimed at developing the human capital of poor households. Targeting its benefits directly to the population in extreme poverty in rural areas, it seeks to alleviate current poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as to reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health, and nutrition.

This study explores the impact of changes in environmental conditions on household labor allocation to the collection of environmental goods such as fuelwood and leaf fodder for a sample of rural Nepali hill households. Households in rural areas of most developing countries often rely heavily on the surrounding environment for goods such as water, wood, and livestock fodder. Frequently these and other environmental products are collected from local common forestland, a task that in many areas is predominantly carried out by women.

This study explores the impact of changes in land tenure institutions on women’s land rights and the efficiency of tree resource management in western Ghana, where cocoa is the dominant crop. Although communal land tenure aims to provide equitable access to land for all households, women’s land rights in the region are weaker than those of men, as is often the case under customary land tenure systems (Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997).

In rural areas of Bangladesh, poverty is pervasive and associated with high rates of malnutrition, especially among preschool children and women. Apart from low levels of energy intakes, it is increasingly recognized that rice-dominated diets such as those consumed by most poor in the countryside may not supply all micronutrients required for a healthy life and productive activities. Children and women are particularly vulnerable to these micronutrient deficiencies because they face relatively higher requirements for growth and reproduction.

With increasing urbanization, the percentage of women participating in the labor force and the percentage of households headed by single mothers have increased. Reliable and affordable child-care alternatives are thus becoming increasingly important in urban areas. The Hogares Comunitarios Program (HCP) was established in Guatemala City in 1991 as a direct response to the increasing need of poor urban dwellers for substitute childcare.

Before 1994 the policy of apartheid in South Africa had systematically denied the majority of the population access to resources through legal restrictions on mobility, property rights, and residential location (Thompson 1990). South African industry fulfilled labor requirements in key industries largely using migrant laborers—mostly men—who worked in one place while their families resided elsewhere.

One in every three preschool-aged children living in developing countries is malnourished. This disturbing yet preventable state of affairs causes untold suffering and, given its wide scale, is a major obstacle to the development process itself. Volumes have been written about the causes of child malnutrition and the actions that can be taken to reduce it— ranging from community-based feeding programs to accelerated economic growth (Smith and Haddad 2000).

Much empirical work has approached the problem of how resource allocations are made within households from the perspective that if preferences differ, welfare outcomes depend on the power of individuals to exert their own preferences. Measures of power are therefore a central component of quantitative empirical approaches to understanding how different preferences translate into different welfare outcomes. Following most of the empirical studies in this genre, this chapter focuses on dynamics within couples.