Leaving two thirds out of development: Female headed households and common property resources in the highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

Drought and famine are historically recurrent phenomena in the Ethiopian highlands, but drought appears to be increasing in frequency and impact, and hunger has become a seemingly permanent feature of the region. For decades it has been known that famine and hunger are not inevitable consequences of drought, and the Ethiopian Government, national and international development agencies, and NGOs have been attempting to understand and address the factors that come together to generate the drought-hunger-poverty nexus. Another phenomenon, which is certainly not new but which is also likely to be much more common and consequential now than in the past, is the high incidence of female household headship and the striking correlation between extreme poverty and female headed households, which seems to be as intransigent as drought. Being a member of a female headed household in highland Ethiopia means having a 35 percent chance of being destitute, compared with only an eight percent chance if one belongs to a male headed household. Female household heads are far more likely to be landless and, when they do have land, 70 percent must sharecrop it out (losing around half of the yield in the process), since they lack access to male labour and oxen to farm it themselves. Female headship and poverty are certainly no strangers in other parts of the world. However, in the case of highland Ethiopia, this very close relationship requires explanation, particularly considering that formal equality between men and women in access to assets such as land and livestock has been part of the region's customary kinship and tenure system for hundreds o f years, and today is embedded in Ethiopia's constitution, as well as in many other laws governing property rights. While currently poor female headed households are supported by food-for-work programmes, their specific needs are otherwise barely addressed and they are largely socially and economically excluded. Development dynamics appear not just to marginalize, but to continually generate, these extremely poor households, as though they were a structural feature of particular economic policies, like under-employment or inflation. Another of the most important and tenacious problems that is argued to either cause or seriously aggravate the drought-poverty-famine nexus in the plough-based cereal farming system of the highlands is severe natural resource degradation, particularly manifest in soil erosion, deforestation, and devegetation. Government and international efforts to understand processes contributing to this degradation and to reverse it have been massive and certainly predate the renowned 1984-85 drought and famine. Successes in reforestation efforts, in protecting other resources such as grazing lands, and in implementing soils and water conservation measures on private holdings, have been significant and some of the degradation appears to have been reversed. However, thus far it appears that little success has been achieved in regenerating people's capacities to earn their livelihoods without foreign aid. widespread malnutrition and misery, and continued degradation of resources especially on common lands that are not protected through enclosure. Natural resource degradation also appears as to be structural feature of the development dynamics of the highlands. Institutions in the highlands, particularly those that are meant to manage land and other natural resources, have undergone substantial change since the mid-1970s. In that process, rights to exploit and manage both private and communal land resources,and the trees and other flora and fauna that are associated with them, have been redefined time and time again. In such processes, of course women's rights were also affected. There were three possible outcomes reforms ameliorated pre-existing inequalities, reproduced or compounded them, or generated new inequalities. However, it is argued in this report that the processes that have resulted in the current unequal access to assets between male and female household heads in the highlands have only barely been affected by land reforms. The reforms were intended to create equality in land holdings, but they have failed to resolve land hunger. Land hunger and the current lack of economic viability of most smallholdings, are generated by the same processes that result in the over-production of women-headed households. The particular forms of household formation and dissolution, and the customary relations of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, are a highland legacy that led to large-scale conversion o f common lands into agricultural holdings and, when this was no longer viable, to the diminution and fragmentation of farms. Setting up a new household, divorcing one spouse in order to marry another with more land, and having children with more than one woman, all presented other means especially for men to gain access to additional land. To mention only a few indicators that hint at the nature of the problem: one study in Tigray found that the average marriage lasted only 7.5 years; larger-scale data from the region show that the average number of children that a Tigrinian woman will have in her lifetime is around 6 8; and two thirds of all households in Tigray own less than a half of a hectare of land As will be discussed in various sections of this report, these same household dynamics are also responsible for generating a large number of poor female headed households Nor is it casual that women constitute the majority of the disadvantaged: this is firmly embedded in gender relations. Common property resources have in a sense “fallen victim” to the dynamics discussed above, since common land was in effect the only land available to assuage the land hunger generated by high rates of household formation and dissolution However, common land is an essential constituent of livelihoods in an area where the ploughbased farming system is dependent on feed resources from communal grazing lands; where house construction, fuel, agricultural and household implements are all mainly derived from trees and other plant species that are found in only miniscule quantities , if at all, on private holdings; where medicines as well as fruits, vegetables and other essential nutrients are also generally not supplied by the cereal and legume-based production system; and where cultural associations with indigenous and wild botanicals have such strong religious foundations that these continue to thrive in local churchyards that are so rich in species diversity and density that other communallyprotected forested areas pale in comparison. The institutional reforms of the past thirty years, and the massive campaigns to halt degradation and reforest the highlands, have had a major impact on those common land areas that have remained. Laws governing the management of such areas have changed repeatedly and have also often failed to define many user rights. Those areas that are protected (“enclosures") have generated considerable environmental benefits, but policies have largely neglected to consider the population's needs for botanical resources other than grass and timber. Enclosures have largely failed to contribute to the livelihoods of the very poor who, lacking livestock and cash, cannot use many of the livelihood resources that they do provide. Common land areas that are not protected have been largely left out of conservation policy: large tracts of land have become de facto open access, and it is upon these lands that the majority of the highland populations rely to meet these multiple material “third" of all livelihood resources will result. The outcome of the interplay between these factors means that much of the highland farming population cannot survive from their holdings, while their rights to exploit and manage non-farm natural resources and common land areas have been severely limited by environmental conservation and regeneration efforts, on the one hand, and by degradation ensuing from de facto open access on the remaining land, on the other. Female headed households, which are the product of civil war, high divorce rates, irresponsible paternity, and unequal division of marital assets, lack the resources to benefit substantially from the limited resource extraction allowed in enclosed areas. On the other hand, in comparison with households that have greater assets, they are forced to rely more heavily on areas that are open access and thus, together with others who are landless and poor, women heads aggravate the degradation that is one of their greatest banes. It is hoped that this introduction highlights the importance of exploring the possible interrelationships between common property resource access, resource degradation, poverty, and household headship in the highland context as a series of postulates. Currently, although there has been much research on development dynamics in the highlands, little is actually known about several of the inter-connections posited above, although they may be vitally important both to human welfare and to environmental recovery in the region. The global objective of this research was to investigate the interrelationships between female headship and access to natural resources in a specific development context in highland Tigray, where the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations operates a programme oriented toward enhancing food security. The specific objectives that guided the research design, literature review, and choice of methods are presented in Box 1. It was soon found, however, that the connections between common property resource access and female household headship were much more complex than anyone first assumed: there are a substantial number of “ intervening variables" in which to become entangled. However, it is this process of disentangling both the direct and indirect relationships that sheds considerable light not only on the nature of the development dynamics in the region, but as well points to the need for new approaches to resolving degradation, enhancing conservation, and contributing to livelihood security in Tigray, by addressing the “missing tw;o thirds" of development. The title of this report thus reflects the initial concerns of FAO's Livelihood Support Programme when it commissioned the study (the point of departure), but it also reflects the conclusions reached after months of literature review and field investigation, which are presented throughout this report and summarized in chapter 7. It was found that women-headed households have in fact been almost completely neglected in policy-making and in development interventions other than in food aid. Common property resources (CPR) were also found to constitute a very important part of livelihood resources (at least a third) but these resources have also in fact been verv largely neglected. It was also found that neglect of both almost certainly together generate further "externalities”, including the reproduction of poverty and resource degradation, and as well as possibly the alarming recent increase in HIV/AIDS in Tigray.