European Journal of Development Research最新文献

This article applies feminist critiques to investigate how agri-food and nutritional development policy and interventions address gender inequality. Based on the analysis presented of global policies and examples of project experiences from Haiti, Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania, we find that the widespread emphasis on gender equality in policy and practice generally ascribes to a gender narrative that includes static, homogenized conceptualizations of food provisioning and marketing. These narratives tend to translate to interventions that instrumentalize women's labor by funding their income generating activities and care responsibilities for other benefits like household food and nutrition security without addressing underlying structures that cause their vulnerability, such as disproportionate work burdens, land access challenges, among many others. We argue that policy and interventions must prioritize locally contextualized social norms and environmental conditions, and consider further the way wider policies and development assistance shape social dynamics to address the structural causes of gender and intersecting inequalities.

We examine the association between the Covid-19 pandemic and and access to basic needs, and how households respond using various coping strategies in the context of Nigeria. We use data from the Covid-19 National Longitudinal Phone Surveys (Covid-19 NLPS-2020) conducted during the Covid-19 lockdown. Our findings reveal that the Covid-19 pandemic is associated with households' exposure to shocks such as illness or injury, disruption of farming, job losses, non-farm business closure, and increase in price of food items and farming inputs. These negative shocks have severe consequences on access to basic needs of households, and the outcomes are heterogeneous across gender of household head and rural-urban residence. Households adopt a number of coping strategies, both formal and informal to mitigate the effects of the shocks on access to basic needs. The findings of this paper lend credence to the growing evidence on need to support households exposed to negative shocks and the role of formal coping mechanisms for households in developing countries.

For decades, India has led the drive for financial inclusion of poor rural women to facilitate attainment of development objectives like poverty alleviation and women's empowerment. More recently, it has promoted digital financial inclusion to further its fight against poverty and gender inequality and support the attainment of UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this paper we take stock of how India's digital financial revolution has affected financial transactions and services with a focus on gender inclusivity for the attainment of the SDGs. We propose a framework to understand the gender inclusivity of digital financial inclusion initiatives that connects the macro developments in the sector with the micro-level experiences of improving women's access and use of these services. We draw on India's nationwide developments and present a case study of an initiative that specifically promotes gender inclusive finance. Our findings suggest that India has made great advances in promoting digital financial inclusion but at the same time, the country has struggled to achieve gender parity even within specific finance-focused programmes designed to improve gender inclusivity. We reflect on policy implications of these findings.