A researcher reflects on the positive changes — and the remaining challenges — in achieving equity for rural women in Northern Ghana.

By Gloria Kukurije Adeyiga

The women of the Sahel regions of Ghana depend on land and tree resources for their livelihoods, in particular, the shea tree (Vitelaria paradoxa), which provides vital income to many women. The oil-rich nuts of the tree are traditionally a women’s resource, providing cash income that women control and granting them some level of financial independence.

However, in recent years, taking advantage of customary law that assigns men control over land, men have asserted greater ownership over shea parklands and extended their control over shea-nut resources, driven by the growing market value of the nuts and the butter made from them. Depriving women of this vital income.

This is a classic example of how cultural norms and customs hinder access to, control over land, fair participation and equal enjoyment of opportunities thereof in northern Ghana. These challenges are a major barrier to land restoration. Interventions targeted to deliver gender equity in projects must therefore unravel these and address them appropriately. Gender norms and customs are deeply entrenched in communities and guide how resources are allocated and restricted. Land-restoration projects need to address these dynamics to deliver inclusive and sustainable outcomes.

The multi-country Regreening Africa project (2017–2022), which is funded by the European Union, aims to reverse land degradation on 1 million hectares across eight Sub-Saharan African countries, including Ghana. Regreening Africa focuses on farmer-managed natural regeneration, tree growing and forms of agroforestry and complementary sustainable land management to address land degradation. In Ghana, Regreening Africa is estimated to have reached 24,000 farming households with technical training, restoring about 53,800 hectares of degraded land to date in the three project sites of Bawku West, Garu Tempane and Mion districts.

As part of Regreening Africa’s effort to meaningfully integrate gender issues, an innovative study was set up to determine whether taking an explicitly gender-transformative approach to land restoration would not only foster changes in harmful gender norms and attitudes but also contribute to desirable environmental outcomes. The gender-transformative approach that we rolled out strategically challenges the underlying causes of gender inequality — that is, exclusionary cultural norms and customs — rather than merely addressing some of the symptoms.

We developed three modules of the Gender Transformative Approach, drawing from existing methods and tools that focused on gender awareness and sensitization, mapping desirable changes, and encouraging household visioning and cohesion. The modules were designed to include discussions, group activities and role plays and these were facilitated in 15 communities of the Bawku West District of the Upper East Region of Ghana. A prior baseline study informed our treatment design, providing an understanding of the potential pathways to achieving balanced workloads, access to resources and equitable decision-making dynamics.

It has been a year and half since the process began and insights from the field are both revealing and powerful. Throughout the process women demonstrated a ‘hunger’ for change and expressed an obvious imbalance in favour of men with few opportunities to freely discuss with men. While men acknowledged their privilege and also expressed a frustration at the burden bequeathed to them by virtue of this privilege, requiring them to lead their families and compelling them to shoulder huge responsibilities that impoverishes many of them, for example, obligations for funeral and marriage rites that require men to provide livestock and cereals as demanded by custom.

Role-plays were particularly enlightening, with women feeling finally heard while men’s attitudes were largely reflective, admitting women don’t get enough recognition for their contribution to the household’s wellbeing. The approach also involved the participatory formulation of markers to map the progress of participating households. Indicators listed small changes (‘like-to-see’ changes) that are easy to attain to changes requiring deep transformation as a result of continuous engagement and action (‘love-to-see’ changes). Indicators confirmed men’s privilege, requiring them to make several concessions, but also revealed the weight of responsibilities as a result of holding many of the household’s resources. Both men and women agreed this imbalance of shared resources was indicative of the household’s vulnerability and required the redistribution of resources to other household members as part of building the household’s resilience.

The indicators also revealed men’s desire to include women in large household decisions, allocate fertile farmlands to women and share domestic chores. Women, on the other hand, desired to have joint control over income from the sale of farm produce, receive support from their husband to diversify their income, and discuss family planning with spouses without judgment.

The first round of monitoring already showed positive changes, with men participating in household chores (such as fetching water, childcare and taking children to school), supporting women to take leadership positions in mixed-gender savings groups, and including women in larger household decisions, such as marriage arrangements for children and funeral planning.

Men hoped these changes encourages women to support them financially in purchasing farm inputs and caring for livestock. Women confirmed receiving financial support from men to start small businesses and feeling included in decisions about the use of income from the sale of produce from the family farm. Women, however, looked forward to accessing homesteads for cultivation, preferring this land because the soil was more fertile and closer to the home, where women also have to attend to several domestic chores.

Discussing men’s participation in the shea-nut trade, men admitted to needing cash from shea nuts to buy farm inputs because they were usually cash strapped at the beginning of the farming season, explaining that shea nuts were a low-investment product and increasingly poor agricultural yields had forced them into this traditionally female domain.

But besides losing income from the shea nuts, women were also worried because of the additional responsibility of pre-processing and selling men’s shea nuts, particularly at a time when they were usually already overburdened with farm activities. Both men and women admitted that this disparity of resource access and work burdens generated a lot of tension in households.

We anticipate that the continuous monitoring of, and support to households by community champions can reveal how men and women (and their households) can benefit from shea nuts more equitably.

Land inheritance for women could potentially set the stage for deeper transformations in the future but it remains a sensitive topic and men struggled to make a stronger commitment. The reality is that men did not have land title that would allow them to bequeath it as they desired because the allodial titles of land owned are vested to family heads who manage land according to cultural norms and customs. In north-eastern Ghana, these norms exclude women from inheriting land as a result of their transient position in the household.

This ‘transience’ stems from the custom that when daughters marry, they leave their father’s house and join their husband’s household, which excludes them from inheriting any part of their father’s land. At the same time, wives are considered ‘visitors’ upon joining their husband’s household and they are not allowed to partake in land decisions. Even unmarried or divorced daughters, who could access family land if available, cannot transfer it to their children as their brothers do and the land they cultivate will revert to their brothers when they die. In the same way, men cannot transfer land to their daughters or wives and their farmland reverts to other brothers if they do not have male children.

As we continue to support households and monitor gender indicators across the landscape over the next months, we anticipate that the enumerated gendered indicators will continue to empower women to negotiate secure access to land and shea-nut resources on farmlands (where shea-nut yields are higher), claim more input into farming decisions and practices, including restoring practices that could improve land productivity, and have more equitable work burdens. The expectation is also that positive changes in how men and women work together will be reflected in the adoption of more sustainable farming practices, enhanced collaboration, improved household cohesion and resilience.

Change is already happening across the landscape, irrespective of these interventions, especially amongst the educated and more exposed younger generation who have encountered gender sensitizing and education or capacity development that have encouraged them to dispel gender stereotypes. Gender Transformative Approaches are however useful because they support and enrich this process by equipping men and women with capacities to discuss sensitive topics, set collective visions and map desired changes that benefit them and the wellbeing of their households. The strength of a Gender Transformative Approach can be attributed to simulating change scenarios, which are helpful in appraising people’s reactions, and giving them the opportunity to reflect, react and adjust accordingly. This helps avoid hostile situations where people feel estranged because of changes they have made or not made in the community.

The Gender Transformative Approach has also provided a better appreciation of the responsibility that researchers and practitioners need to assume to be able to deliver on gender-equality goals and the need to strengthen the capacity of project staff and implementing partners. This is a key precondition to successfully deploy context-specific gender tools and approaches that are tailored to the needs and conditions of different communities.

That being said, we have come a long way in demonstrating to practitioners the need to actively engage women in land restoration and, hopefully, this research can contribute to building the case for meaningful engagement with the structural causes of gender inequality and the need to go beyond simply having equal numbers of men and women participating in restoration activities. Ultimately, we look forward to sharing learning lessons from the process so that they can be adapted and expanded in other restoration contexts.

As a researcher, I have often wondered if gender transformation is possible in my lifetime in northern Ghana, where women traditionally lag behind men in politics, agriculture, business and education and are culturally defined by submissiveness to men in many situations. This question often arises from my own prejudices, experiences, struggles to conform or not and the need to remain unbiased in this process. And to think that I’m not your ‘average Northern woman’, which has often been used to dismiss my ‘idealistic ideas’ for women or shame my seeming ‘refusal’ to reflect Northern values. I’ve also had several peers argue against ‘rocking the boat’ of men’s privileged position because it is the tradition and that gender transformation is a foreign ‘agenda’ that does not benefit anyone in the longer term.

But irrespective of my personal struggles with gender norms, the Gender Transformative Approach has received encouraging feedback from across the landscape with non-participating households wishing to be included, stating various observable positive changes in participating households. As far as development practitioners are concerned, I hope this research provides the needed evidence that desirable and sustainable outcomes can be achieved for both men and women when interventions go beyond the rhetoric of equal participation.

Either way, this research has me unsettled and pondering the characteristics of gender transformation and whether development practitioners are truly committed to gender transformation as reflected in recent project designs.

Author’s note: Some Northern women’s values from a Northern man’s perspective are obedience, modesty, respectful, hardworking, neat, not quarrelsome, discreet, good cook and able to bear children.

About the author: Gloria Kukurije Adeyiga is a researcher with the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, based in Bolgatanga, Upper East Region. She is pursuing her PhD in Agroforestry at the University of Bangor, working on the Regreening Africa project led by ICRAF.

Read more

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