Who claims the rights to livestock? Gendered patterns of asset holdings in smallholder households in Uganda

ABSTRACT

Although data on livestock ownership are often collected at the household level, not all household members have the same rights over the livestock. In this paper, we investigate the gendered patterns of livestock ownership in smallholder households in Uganda using a unique data set with information on ownership, management, and decision-making across different types of livestock. Drawing on the bundle of rights frameworks, the analysis demonstrates the importance of going beyond analyses of ownership to also consider these other rights. We find that people who claim to be owners may not have the management or fructus rights. People also may have these latter rights without claiming ownership. We also find discrepancies in the responses from spouses; they provide different answers regarding who owns and has the rights over livestock. This suggests patterns of asymmetric information and potentially the hiding of animals from one’s spouse.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender asset gap
• intrahousehold dynamics
• livestock

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While much of the literature refers to husbands and wives providing different responses as disagreements, we prefer to treat these as discrepancies in responses.

2 One of the authors was involved in the design and collection of the data. The data was collected as part of the Global Strategy to improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics (GSARS) in 2016. GSARS is housed in the Statistics Division at FAO. The data are available at Food and Agriculture Microdata (FAM) Catalogue: https://microdata.fao.org/index.php/catalog/1918.

3 The tropical livestock unit is weighted sum of all animals: cattle = 0.7, Goats = 0.1, Sheep = 0.1, pigs = 0.2 and chicken = 0.01 following (Otte & Chilonda, 2002).

4 Note that the questions ask about the decisions made since the last rainy season. Thus, in some cases, no decision has been made in this period.

5 If the wife says the household keeps goats and she has rights over these goats, for example, and the husband reports the household does not have any goats, we categorize this as the husband not acknowledging her rights. If the wife says the household keeps goats but she has no rights over them, and the husband reports the household does not have any goats, we categorize this as that both respond the wife does not have rights over goats.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM): https://pim.cgiar.org/.

Notes on contributors

Marya Hillesland

Marya Hillesland is a Research Officer at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK.

Cheryl Doss

Cheryl Doss is a Professor of International Development at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK.

Vanya Slavchevska

Vanya Slavchevska is a Social Policy Officer (Poverty Reduction) with the Inclusive Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division (ESP) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy.

Martina Querejeta

Martina Querejeta is an Assistant Researcher at the Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Administration, Universidad de la República, Uruguay.