Beyond empowerment: gendered labour and social reproduction in rural Nigeria

Ayodeji, A. O., Ainslie, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7549-7643 and Kambhampati, U. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5906-2394 (2025) Beyond empowerment: gendered labour and social reproduction in rural Nigeria. Development. ISSN 1461-7072 doi: 10.1057/s41301-025-00459-1

Abstract/Summary

This article explores gendered intrahousehold labour dynamics in cassava-producing households in South-west Nigeria, moving beyond conventional empowerment narratives to interrogate how labour is organized, valued and controlled within a rural agrarian community. Using a mixed-methods approach with sex-disaggregated survey data collected from 570 households, and in-depth interview and focus groups discussion, this study considers how labour is distributed within the household along the cassava value-chain and its structure through gendered norms and power hierarchies. It reveals that while men increasingly outsource physically demanding agricultural tasks such as land preparation and harvesting due to access to mechanization and hired labour, women’s labour workloads remain intensive and unchanged, mostly concentrated in manual processing, marketing and unpaid reproductive work. The study shows divergence in male and female spouse reports of participation in labour activities. By applying a feminist political economy lens, this study shows that women’s intensive labour in cassava production reflects structural incorporation into gendered labour regimes rather than empowerment. It challenges assumptions of collaborative household labour by revealing how women’s work sustains agrarian accumulation while remaining undervalued and invisible. This advances existing studies by shifting the focus from participation to the structural conditions that reproduce labour exploitation.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/128033
Identification Number/DOI	10.1057/s41301-025-00459-1
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Economics Life Sciences > School of Agriculture, Policy and Development > Department of International Development
Publisher	Springer Nature
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item