Gender, Control, and Crop Choice in Northern Mozambique

Women play an important role in the agricultural production process in developing countries, yet their role in making decisions about what to grow and the resulting implications for household welfare remain poorly understood. This paper studies women’s empowerment in northern Mozambique as it relates to agriculture, considering in particular the factors that lead to women’s managing the plots that they nominally control. Women control about 30 percent of the plots in the data but manage only about 70 percent of those plots. Using a unique panel dataset, the study finds that women are more likely to manage plots when households have historically had access to off-farm labor, typically completed by men. When women manage plots, they tend to grow crops with less complicated production techniques and are less likely to grow the area’s main cash crop. However, conditional on historical access to off farm labor, their farm incomes are the same as those among men.