Gender relations and technological change : the need for an integrative framework of analysis

This paper, focusing on the small farm situation in sub-Saharan Africa, suggests that an alternative analytic framework is needed to give gender issues explicit attention within FSR/E. Such a framework should treat the small farming unit as an interlocking, gendered system of market production and subsistence economic and reproductive activities. Key methodological needs within this framework are to: (1) take into account household/family forms and composition; (2) explore, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the degree of flexibility and substitutability between women"s labor and capital and that of other household members; and (3) examine, during on-farm FSR/E, the economic role of household service activities, the strategies used by women to meet basic household needs, the distribution of male and female labor over the total production cycle, and the particular technological and economic needs of women. Constraints on implementation of such an FSR/E approach are outlined in a concluding section.