Rural women’s farmers access to productive resources: the moderating effect of culture among Nupe and Yoruba in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper analyzes ownership and control of productive resources by gender as determined by culture. This is premised on the fact that past researchers have isolated gender and productive resources on one hand and gender and culture on the other. In this paper, the novelty is the exploration of the interplay among culture, gender and productive resources. Using a descriptive quantitative research design, a simple random sampling was used to select 100 households from a sampling frame of 200 households generated through house listing in three villages from Patigi Local Government Area of Kwara State. Data were collected with a structured questionnaire covering ownership, and decision making on selected productive resources and analyzed using Frequency counts, percentages and Chi-square test statistics based on the fact that the variables are categorical. Gender and ownership as well as decision making were cross-tabulated and then layered with culture as a third variable. The results were disaggregated along Nupe and Yoruba culture as well as along gender lines for the selected productive resources covered in this paper. Men predominate in ownership of productive resources among Yoruba than Nupe culture. Women from Nupe culture had higher distribution of ownership in the productive resources than men particularly land, small livestock and non-mechanized farm equipment. The results further show higher proportion of ownership of productive resources among men in Yoruba culture. Women in Nupe culture had greater proportion of ownership of productive resources than Yoruba women. Males make decision to sell all productive resources except small livestock and also make decision in almost all the farming activities listed except when and who will take crop to the market in both Nupe and Yoruba cultures. Culture has a stronger influence on women’s access and control of productive resources than the mere biological differentiation of gender into male and female. There is a strong cultural influence among Nupe and Yoruba women as a result of the interplay of gender, ownership and decision making and culture on selected productive resources.