Abstract
Sub-Saharan African women on small-acreage farms carry a disproportionately higher labor burden, which is one of the main reasons they are unable to produce for both home and the market and realize higher incomes. Labor-saving interventions such as hand-tools are needed to save time and/or increase productivity in, for example, land preparation for crop and animal agriculture, post-harvest processing, and meeting daily energy and water needs. Development of such tools requires comprehensive and content-specific anthropometric data or body dimensions and existing databases based on Western women may be less relevant. We conducted measurements on 89 women to provide preliminary results toward answering two questions. First, how well existing databases are applicable in the design of hand-tools for sub-Saharan African women. Second, how universal body dimension predictive models are among ethnic groups. Our results show that, body dimensions between Bantu and Nilotic ethnolinguistic groups are different and both are different from American women. These results strongly support the need for establishing anthropometric databases for sub-Saharan African women, toward hand-tool design.
Highlights
In sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural production predominantly occurs on smallholder farms (Herrero et al, 2010), where women carry a disproportionately higher labor burden (Yisehak, 2008), which is one of the main reasons contributing to the gender asset gap e women are unable to produce for both home and the market (FAO, 2011; Quisumbing et al, 2014)
To first gain an overview in the ways these women differ with respect to ethnicity and location, we used Principle Component Analysis (PCA)
We chose an approach that relies on a plot of eigenvalues against principle components (PCs)
Summary
In sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural production predominantly occurs on smallholder farms (Herrero et al, 2010), where women carry a disproportionately higher labor burden (Yisehak, 2008), which is one of the main reasons contributing to the gender asset gap e women are unable to produce for both home and the market (FAO, 2011; Quisumbing et al, 2014). In a recent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grand challenge exploration, “Labor Saving Strategies and Innovations for Women Smallholder Farmers”, over 50% of the initial funded intervention explorations were hand-tools. This is not surprising; almost a decade ago, a limited range of hand-tools as a productivity problem was identified in a comprehensive FAO report on farm power and mechanization for smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa (Sims and Kienzle, 2006). Some data for foreign populations are available in the NASA data bank (Agrawal et al, 2010), but even in this case, sub-Saharan Africans are not well represented
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