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).

Assets are an important means of coping with adverse events in developing countries but the role of gendered ownership is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates changes in assets owned by the household head, his spouse, or jointly by both of them in response to shocks in rural agricultural households in Bangladesh with the help of detailed household survey panel data. Land is owned mostly by men, who are wealthier than their spouses with respect to almost all types of assets, but relative ownership varies by type of asset.

A "gender map" of agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to better understand how to target agricultural interventions to women and men farmers.

This policy note summarizes research that explored the perceptions of agricultural households in rural Bangladesh about climate change and their choices of coping mechanisms and adaptation strategies.

Project Note

This policy note summarizes research exploring the challenges and opportunities associated with building human, organizational, and institutional capacity to respond effectively to the adverse impacts of climate change as they relate to agriculture and rural livelihoods in developing countries.

This policy note summarizes research that analyzed the adverse impact of climate-related shocks on farm households’ real per capita consumption and asset ownership over time, as well as factors that exacerbate or ameliorate those adverse impacts.

This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste to calculate five indicators: incidence of ownership by sex; distribution of ownership by sex; and distribution of plots, mean plot size, and distribution of land area, all by sex of owner.

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.

"Advocates of reforms in land rights and land markets frequently posit two important hypotheses: (1) African countries must grant land titles to farmers because titles increase land tenure security and facilitate access to input, land, and financial markets; and (2) land markets constitute the most efficient mechanism for allocating resources and improving access to productive resources by the poor, especially women and other marginalized groups...