Bio:

Jaah Mkupete is a development economist and Lecturer affiliated with the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Mkwawa University College of Education. Jaah is also a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Dietetics and Nutrition at the University of Western Cape. Jaah holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Stellenbosch and his research interests are agriculture, health economics, and spatial econometrics.

Project summary:

The recent status of women in agriculture and food systems report acknowledges that women’s less access to productive resources, low participation in strategic decision-making in the household and low ability to allocate time resources within households increase their vulnerability to climate change and the gender gap in agricultural productivity. Women's empowerment is considered a key pathway for boosting women's resilience to climate shock and narrowing the gender gap in productivity. However, this has rarely been empirically directly tested, partly due to a lack of standard measures for women's empowerment. Drawing on gender disaggregated Bangladesh Integrated Household Panel Surveys, the proposed study aims to use the standardized women empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI) to explore whether; (a) women's empowerment can bridge the gender productivity gap between female and male farmers under harsh weather conditions, (b) empowering women offsets the negative effects of climate change on productivity and welfare, and (c) which aspects of empowerment matter.