In this paper we show that in rural Burundi the characteristics of the female's kinship are highly correlated with female's bargaining power, as proxied by her decision-making power. First, a female whose own immediate family is at least as rich as her husband's counterpart enjoys a greater say over children-and asset-related decision-making. Second, the size, relative wealth and proximity of the extended family also matter. Third, kinship characteristics prove to be more important than (standard) individual and household characteristics. Finally, we also show that the female's say over asset-related decisionmaking is positively associated with males' education, more than with female's education per se. All these correlation patterns can inform policies aiming at empowering women or targeting children through women's empowerment.
We investigate the relationship between exposure to the Burundi Civil War and household (food) poverty, using a three-wave household-level panel matched with data on local-level violence. We find that households living in localities exposed to the war have been subsequently more likely to be poor than non-exposed households. Within-household estimations, controlling for time-varying heterogeneity at the province level, confirm the positive impact of violence exposure on household poverty. We investigate some of the potential mechanisms at play in the violence -poverty nexus, and the role of violence exposure in household poverty dynamics over time. Our results notably suggest that the destruction of physical capital, as well as a shift of exposed households out of non-farm activities, shape poverty dynamics and lower their chances of durably remaining out of poverty.
This paper delves into the relationship between child nutritional outcome and (multiple) female work status in Nigeria from a micro perspective. The child nutritional outcome is proxied by child weight-for-age. Female work includes wage employment outside the household, household on-farm agricultural work, and household non-farm enterprise activities. Multilevel mixed-effects regression results show that female involvement in any type of work is positively and significantly associated with child weight-for-age. However, female simultaneous involvement in on-farm and non-farm work is the only female work combination positively and significantly associated with child weight-for-age. We describe the mechanism behind our findings through the lens of (positive) income effect versus (negative) childcare effect, which is consistent with two sets of further findings. On one hand, sub-sample analysis shows that female wage work significantly matters, in a non-linear fashion, for children aged two to five years (toddlers) and boys exclusively. On the other hand, female on-farm work significantly matters for children aged zero to two years (infants) and girls exclusively.
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