New pathways for women’s empowerment in pastoralist Maasai households, Tanzania

Despite the extensive scholarship on women's empowerment and gender equality in the Global South, few studies have examined how changing livelihoods create new challenges and opportunities for women seeking access to intra-household decision-making. Here we examine pastoralist Maasai women's access to a range of household-level decisions that span more longstanding and more recent aspects of changing social and economic life. Our team conducted a mixed-methods data collection in 10 Maasai communities in northern Tanzania in 2018 and 2022. We (1) interviewed groups of women and men (n = 18) to identify key types of household decisions and the factors affecting women's access to them; and (2) conducted a survey of married women (n = 321) to identify individuals' perceptions of access to intra-household decision-making and other characteristics. We applied an information theoretic approach to model selection of fitted cumulative link mixed effects models. Our findings show that newer sources of human, social, and physical capital for women, including school-based education, land tenure, and community group membership, are associated with access to more contemporary decision types, including income generation, children's schooling, and children's health care. Alternatively, we find fewer pathways to decision-making for more longstanding decision types, including livestock management and children's marriage. Notably, agricultural land has a complex relationship with decision-making wherein basic access to land is associated with lower access to decision-making, but land tenure is associated with greater access. This study shows how marginalized women can leverage changing social and economic contexts to gain greater access to intra-household decision-making.