Health Condition and Female Agricultural Productivity in Nigeria

The proportion of women’s participation in agriculture differs by regions in developing countries. Nevertheless, this disparity notwithstanding, women actively participate in different nods of agricultural value chain. As at 2011, out of women labour, above 50% were agricultural workers and above 20% were observed to be cultivators. However, only about 13% of the operational holdings were owned by women, which shows gender asymmetry in resource ownership in agriculture. It has been argued that when women are given opportunities in agriculture, such as access to land, credit among others, it will enhance their productivity, which forms the basis of this studies. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of health conditions of female/women on their level of agricultural productivity. Therefore, the study aims to answer the research question ‘what is the impact of women health condition on household agricultural productivity? The study engaged wave 4 (2018/2019) of the Living Stand Measurement Study, Integrated Survey on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). The reason for using wave 4 is because, it is the more recent wave of the LSMS-ISA, at the point of writing this report. The LSMS-ISA data is a general household data by the World Bank in collaboration with National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of Nigeria. From the pooled data, we disaggregated female-headed households, using the household identification (hhid). Therefore, this study is based on female-headed households, while the male-headed households were excluded from the analysis. The study engaged the descriptive statistics, t-test to examine the significant difference in productivity between household-heads who are healthy and those who are not, the legit regression to estimate the determinants of health condition, and the propensity score matching (PSM) technique to estimate the impact of health condition on female agricultural productivity. The result from the test of mean difference shows that there is a significant difference in productivity between household heads who are healthy and those who are not. It implies that, those who are healthier have higher level of productivity than their counterparts who are not. From the determinants of health condition, using the logit regression, the result shows that household income, education, ICT adoption, and location are significant determinants. From the impact analysis, using the PSM, the result shows that, access to healthcare by female headed households contributes 28.49% to the level of their productivity. The result informs the need to enhance women access to healthcare, especially, farming households in the rural areas, for higher agricultural productivity. Therefore, the study suggests that policies such as improved healthcare systems, among others, geared towards enhancing female engagement in agriculture and services alongside other concerned sectors should be promoted.