Understanding the gender gap in productivity in agricultural production among smallholder cereal growers in rural Ghana

The objective of this paper is to investigate the differences in the agricultural productivity of male and female cereal growers in rural Ghana. This study uses data from the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey (GSPS) conducted in 2017/2018. The paper employs the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition method to decompose the unconditional gender productivity gap into endowment effects and structural effects. The findings show that the total cereal production of female plot managers is 46% lower than that of their male counterparts. The results from the study reveal that the gender productivity gap varies across productivity distributions. Access to agricultural lands and inputs was found to be the principal factor driving the gender productivity gap. The paper contribute to literature by using actual harvest per acre of land for the yield function instead of using sales revenue which has been adopted by most earlier. Unlike several earlier studies that rely on dataset from small localized communities that cannot provide much information on external validity of their findings, the study uses a national representative dataset for its analysis. The study is the first study in Ghana that tries to investigate the dynamics of the endowment effect and structural effect at different quintiles of the yield function of farm produce.Even though it is widely acknowledged that productivity gap exists between female and male farmers, the available evidence has often relied on samples from small localized communities. Unlike earlier studies this paper uses data from Ghana that covers a wide geographical area and therefore findings and policy recommendations are nationalistic in nature. Thus, any policy to improve access to agricultural land and inputs by women will greatly contribute to the reduction of the gender productivity gaps among cereal growers in rural Ghana and other similar rural communities in sub-Sahara Africa that share similar cultural, religious and socio-economic characteristics like that of rural Ghana.