Page 54 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

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

From table 4.5, it is observed that, a unit increase in the empowerment of single
women will lead to a 93% decrease on agricultural production, even though
statistically insignificant. Moreover, the results reveal that only 8% of variation in
agricultural production is cause by the variables of single women. Furthermore all the
other variables are statistically insignificant and cannot be used for inference. On the
other hand, the empowerment of married women will bring about a positive increase
in agricultural production, statistically significant at 1% level of significance. The
results have therefore shown that agriculture is a critical source of livelihoods for
married women in Cameroon and a key pathway out of poverty especially in the rural
area. This is seen the empowerment of women in the urban area rather brings about a
74% decrease in agricultural production, significant at 10% level of significance. It
also portrays that women in rural areas who are especially constrained by a lack of
access to inputs, productive resources, and services will be more productive if they
are empowered to gain such access.

The findings tie with Malhotra et al (2002) who revealed that married women may face
more socio-cultural inhibitions even to participate well in agriculture due to
interpersonal gender dynamics within the household, emanating from marriage systems,
which responsible for much of women’s social exclusion. Hence, the empowerment of
such women uplifts them from cultural norms and consequently makes them more
productive especially if they draw on support from husbands. Also, following Novarty
(2005) it is observed that, married couples are likely to be more engaged in income
generating activities than single women due to labor reinforcement in accomplishing
farm and non- farm activities hence the married women are likely to be in a more
agriculturally productive situation. This finding is however dissimilar to Grantham
(2012) who revealed that marriage strongly negatively affects women’s labour force
participation and productivity. This may be due to the fact that the women were not
empowered as in the case of our findings. As such, most all of them had limited access
to land, finance and farm inputs as they depend upon their husband’s land.

Going by the results presented in table 4.5 above, it can be said that the model
specified for married women is reliable, indicated by the Wald chi2 (df): Prob>chi2,
which show that the explanatory variables are globally significant in determining
agricultural production. Thus, together all the regressors have a significant effect on
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agricultural production, as the Wald statistic is significant at 1%. The R also reveals
that about 25% of variation in agricultural production is been explained by the
independent variables specified in our model, while other variables are captured in the
error term.

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