Page 36 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.81, # 2, 2024, pp. 30-59

The results of the analysis showed a negative, robust correlation between level of
education and food security status among households in Nigeria. Agarwal (1997)
conducted a study on the challenges and coping strategies of women food crops
entrepreneurs in Fako Division, Cameroon and found that the country is experiencing
high rural exodus and urban growth rates. The result is a continual reduction of the
agricultural labour force in the face of an increasing demand for food and as such,
women food crop entrepreneurs play an important role in filling the gap created by
this phenomenon. This study also observed that because female food entrepreneurs
have very few employment alternatives, they are forced to implement coping
strategies, which although vital in maintaining them in the sector, do not usually
measure up to the challenges. But since the activities of these women have impacts
beyond micro levels, government and other agents of development cannot afford to
abandon these women.

The above review of literature reveals that the majority of the studies have been
conducted in this domain. However, very little has been done in less developed
countries such as Cameroon. More over emphasis has been laid on agricultural
production in attaining food security neglecting the role of the main actors who are
women. This study therefore seeks to investigate this relationship between agricultural
production and women empowerment other than empowerment in agriculture. The
study also constructs an indicator to capture women empowerment which has not been
done in other studies in Cameroon. This study will definitely bring about marginal
value to the existing body of knowledge on the role of women to agricultural
production.

METHODOLOGY OF STUDY
Women empowerment is an appropriate framework for analyzing agricultural
production as conditioned by other complementary variables (UN, 2017). In our
model, women empowerment (WE) and agricultural production (AP) are jointly
determined, thus, considering the problem of variable omission in our data due to bias
in the time of collection or treatment, the problem of endogeneity bias may arise. To
resolve this problem of endogeneity bias, we sort for an instrument that will
consistently estimate the contribution of women empowerment on agricultural
production (Deschenes and Greenstone, 2004). The instrument, otherwise known as
treatment variable, is that variable that can affect women empowerment without
directly influencing agricultural production. Here, we are interested in using the
cluster mean of costs of medical consultation. In fact the agricultural production
generating functions may take the following structural form:

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