Gardens and Gender: What We Miss in Measuring Intra-Household Poverty

“How’s your garden?”

This was a common question I often heard in Gulu, Uganda. Especially at the start of the country’s two rainy seasons—one beginning in March and the other in September—women frequently exchanged this phrase in markets, hair salons, and even non-profit offices. In Gulu, a garden was not merely an aesthetic feature of everyday life in a rapidly growing city. While the effort put into planting cassava, sweet potatoes, cabbages, and beans might create visually pleasing rows of crops, the primary purpose of these gardens was subsistence. What piqued my curiosity about these gardens was not only how they were essentially small farms named differently but also how they were often cultivated and managed primarily by women. These gardens highlight women’s well-known role in subsistence agriculture and raise the question: Do poverty measurements fully capture how resources are shared within a household?

A global survey conducted by the World Bank, which included data from 89 countries, reveals that girls and women of reproductive age are more likely to live in poor households compared to men and boys.

Specifically, for every 100 men aged 25 to 34 living in poor households, 122 women in the same age group face similar circumstances. This research combined individual and household-level data to underscore this disparity. However, measurements of poverty often fail to capture these gender differences because they typically operate under the assumption that there is perfect resource sharing within households.

Consider, for example, a measurement as popular as headcount poverty. It represents the percentage of people in a population that are considered poor. To get to a headcount poverty measure, the procedure typically goes like this: conduct a survey collecting data on income or consumption at the household level, compare that the sample data is accurately representative of the population, set the poverty line at something like $2.15 per day, as it is internationally, then compare household or individual consumption to this line and finally, for those whose consumption is below this line, consider them to be poor.

As a measure, headcount poverty serves as a straightforward and effective tool for policy communication. However, a common contradiction arises in poverty measurements. While poverty data is collected at the household level, it is often generalized to the individual level as per capita poverty. Even when various household shapes and sizes are considered through weights and equivalence scales, many models for measuring poverty assume that within similar households, all adults are treated the same. In consumption-focused measurements, as seen in countries like Uganda, this leads to the prevailing assumption that in a household with two adults, what one person consumes is also consumed by the other.

Essentially, what is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.

Women in Gulu are likely to disagree with the assumption of perfect and equal sharing of resources within their households. While there are various reasons why seasonal subsistence farms may be managed by women, this assumption remains inadequate in presenting a holistic picture of intra-household poverty. Research by Gaddis et al. (2018) reveals significant disparities in measuring poverty within households.

Their analysis, based on datasets that account for individualized consumption across different countries, shows that women and children often receive smaller shares of resources for both food and non-food items. The situation is further complicated because women’s bargaining power within the household can depend on their status as a first, second, or third wife or as a mother rather than just as a wife. These complexities indicate that women do not experience poverty in just one way. Rather, their gender-specific needs and consumption patterns must be considered.

The collective household model developed by Brown et al. (2022) offers a path to addressing inequality within the household while measuring poverty. The model identifies that a household consists of differently aged and gendered individuals, such as elderly women, who have different preferences in goods and access to decision-making power. By assuming Pareto efficiency, that no household member is better off without another member becoming worse off, they model how placing restrictions on an individual share of total expenditures shows variations in preferences within households. As a step forward, this model provides an opportunity to think critically about how behaviors within the household, such as trust between mothers and sons or the nutritional needs of women during their reproductive years, can be modeled for stronger poverty measures. 

At the heart of the garden talk in Gulu, Uganda, lies what many involved in poverty reduction policies and programs know: to be effective, in-depth, comprehensive measurement of poverty is critical for targeting strategies to reduce it. Poverty measurements should be refined to pick up greater nuances, helping policymakers better tailor and target anti-poverty approaches to specific needs, whether related to gender or other factors.