Overview

The data collection included two phases: qualitative field work and a household assets survey. In the qualitative phase, the primary methodology was Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), complemented by interviews with key informants and a compilation of the secondary literature. The focus groups focused on four themes: the accumulation of assets over the life cycle; the importance of assets; the market for assets; and household decision-making over asset acquisition and use.The quantitative phase of the study involved the planning and execution of household surveys. Data was collected on all physical and financial assets of households along with ownership information. The assets covered include housing, agricultural land, livestock, agricultural implements, non-farm economic activities and associated assets, consumer durables and financial assets. We also have data on household demographics, livelihoods, awareness of inheritance laws, recent shocks and coping strategies, decision-making and consumption expenditure. We interviewed two people within a household (the principal couple, whenever possible).

The fielded surveys were representative at the national level for Ecuador and Ghana and at the level of the state for Karnataka, India. These data sets have been used to calculate measures of the gender asset and wealth gaps for these three countries and to provide methodological insights that will inform future collection and presentation of individual-level asset data.

A parallel strand of analysis is to identify the critical enabling or constraining social, economic and institutional factors affecting women's asset ownership, as well as to establish how women’s ownership of assets affects development outcomes. In addition, the project is working with government statistical agencies, international organizations and civil society organizations to find ways to collect better data and use it to strengthen women’s property rights.

The project is housed at the Centre of Public Policy (CPP) at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). The project team leaders are Hema Swaminthan, IIMB; Abena D. Oduro, University of Ghana; Carmen Diana Deere, University of Florida; and Cheryl Doss, University of Oxford. FLACSO-Ecuador hosted the field work in Ecuador.

Initial funding for this project was provided by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the MDG3 Fund for gender equality (Grant Number IN224/2008). Additional funding for data analysis was received from the UN Foundation, UN Women, and the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program.

Team Leaders:

Abena D. Oduro is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Director of the Centre for Social Policy Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. Her current research is in the areas of gender and assets, gender and enterprise development, poverty and vulnerability analysis and child marriage. She has recently conducted studies for UN Women, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). She has published in international journals and has contributed articles to various chapters in books. She is an associate editor of Feminist Economics and is one of the co-editors of the journal’s special issue on Engendering Economic Policy in Africa published in 2015.

Carmen Diana Deere is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Food and Resource Economics and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida and Honorary Professor Emeritus at FLACSO-Ecuador. She was formerly Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida (2004-2009) and at the University of Massachusetts (1992-2004). Deere is a Past President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and of the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS). She serves on numerous editorial boards and is an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. She is the co-author of Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), winner of LASA’s Bryce Wood Book Award and NECLAS’s Best Book Award, and co-editor of special issues of Feminist Economics on women and the distribution of wealth and on gender and international migration. Deere has carried out recent studies for UN Women and other UN agencies, the Brazilian Ministry for Agricultural Development, the International Land Coalition and the World Bank. Her primary areas of research are gender inequality in asset ownership, land policy and agrarian reform, migration and remittances, rural social movements and gender in Latin American agricultural development.

Hema Swaminathan is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. She is an empirical economist with broad interests in understanding the causes and consequences of social and human development with a focus on household behaviour. Dr. Swaminathan has field work experience in India and Sub-Saharan Africa and has examined the relationship between asset ownership and public health outcomes in several countries in Africa and South Asia. She has also been involved in research projects examining structural determinants of rural poverty and the impact of welfare reform on poor populations in the U.S.

Cheryl Doss is a Senior Lecturer in Development Economics at the University of Oxford. Her publications have included articles in World Development, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Feminist Economics, and Economic Development and Cultural Change. She has co-edited three special issues of Feminist Economics, including one with Carmen Diana Deere about women and the distribution of wealth. Her research focuses generally on issues of land, assets, agriculture, technology adoption and intra-household resource allocation, especially in rural households in Africa. She was the lead PI on the project, Pathways to Women’s Access to Assets: Land Tenure and Beyond, funded through the Assets and Market Allocation CRSP at USAID. She has recently been involved with studies for the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute , the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, UN Statistics and the UK Department for International Development.

Other Current Team Members:

William Baah-Boateng is a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Ghana and a senior research fellow at the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET). he is also a fellow of International Institute for Advanced Studies based in Ghana and a member of the Board of Directors of the Ghana chapter of the Association for the Advancement of African Women’s Economists (AAAWE). His core research focuses on analysis of the labour market and labour market institutions, poverty and gender.

Louis Boakye-Yiadom is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of Ghana. He holds a PhD (Economics) from the University of Bath and has broad empirical research interests in household livelihood strategies and their relationships with poverty/well-being, inequality, gender and asset ownership. He is particularly interested in the micro-economic analysis of migration, remittance flows, child fostering and education. Louis has taught a wide range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including courses on development economics, economic theory and economic planning.

Suchitra J. Y.is a researcher with the Centre for Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. Her work spans a range of issues on social exclusion including gendered patterns of asset ownership.

Zachary Catanzarite joined the UF-FLACSO project in March of 2011 as statistical data analyst for the Ecuador Household Assets Survey. He is an interdisciplinary psychologist with a M.A. in Sociology from the University of Florida, where he focused on social class, and a M.A. in Psychology from New York University, where he focused on advanced statistical analysis and social support processes.

Past Team Members:

Comparative Team:

Caren Grown is the World Bank Group Senior Director for Gender. Prior to joining the Bank, she was Economist-In-Residence and co-director of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics at American University (AU) in Washington, DC during which time she took leave to serve as Senior Gender Advisor and Acting Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment at the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Dr. Grown has authored/edited five books on gender, macroeconomics, and public finance; her articles have appeared in World Development, Journal of International Development, Feminist Economics, Health Policy and Planning, and The Lancet. She holds PhD and Masters’ Degrees in Economics from the New School for Social Research.

Marya Hillesland is an economist focusing on issues of gender, development, and agriculture with the Global Strategy for Improving Agricultural and Rural Statistics (GSARS) in Rome, Italy. Prior to working with GSARS, she was a gender and statistics senior consultant with the gender team at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. While earning her Ph.D., Marya was a visiting scholar with Instituto de Investigaciones en Ciencias Economicas (IICE), Universidad of Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica and a research consultant for ACDI/VOCA, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. She was also an adjunct professor for undergraduate classes in microeconomics, gender roles in the economy, and feminist economic thought at American University in Washington, DC. Marya holds a Ph.D. in economics in the fields of gender and development, and a master’s degree in international affairs from American University.

Ecuador:

Jacqueline Contreras was the co-Coordinator of the Ecuador Study and Professor-Researcher in the Gender & Culture Program at FLACSO-Ecuador. She currently is a Professor at the Catholic University in Quito. She holds a M.A. degree in Social Sciences from FLACSO-Ecuador and a B.A. in Economics from the Catholic University of Ecuador, and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Medellin. She is co-author (with A. Armas and A. Vásconez) of The Care Economy: Paid and Unpaid Work in Ecuador (Comisión de Transición, INEC, AECID, UNIFEM, EUT 2009). Her primary areas of research are gender inequality in asset ownership, gender and time use, gender budgeting and gender and the environment.

Jennifer Twyman was the Research Assistant to the Ecuador Study and a Visiting Scholar at FLACSO-Ecuador when she was a doctoral student in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Florida. Her dissertation research focused on the intra-household distribution of assets and asset wealth in Ecuador. She holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Agricultural Economics from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. She is currently a researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.

Eduardo Encalada is the Director of Field Operations for the survey and public opinion consulting firm, HABITUS, S.A., which carried out the Ecuador Household Assets Survey. He is a statistical engineer with a B.S. degree from the Central University of Ecuador. From 1987 to 2002 he was employed at the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) of Ecuador where he coordinated the national employment surveys, income and expenditure surveys and the standard of living survey. He has also been a consultant to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. He has been with HABITUS, S.A. since 2003.

India:

Manita Rao is a Part-Time Consultant with the India Team and holds a Master's in Social Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Masters in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai. She has worked internationally in academic institutions and non-profit organizations and collaborated on research projects in the areas of gender, education and child rights. Her areas of interest include public policy around families, women and children. Manita joined the India team in August 2010.

Rahul Lahoti a Researcher on the India team, has a Master's in Public Administration from Columbia University and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. He has worked with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Center for Evaluation and Global Action at UC, Berkeley. He is interested in public policy issues concerning poverty, inequality and nutrition.

Shanthala S. is a Project Associate with the India Team, which she joined in April 2009. She has a Master's in Commerce from Bangalore University. She primarily takes care of the administrative and accounting requirements of the project.

Shreekanth Mahendiran is a Research Assistant for the India Team. He has a MSc. in Economics from the Madras School of Economics, Anna University. He has interned at Roulac India Investment Advisory, Hyderabad and worked at IIMB as an Academic Intern, working on the energy, banking and micro-finance data and literature of South Asian countries. Shreekanth joined the India study in March 2010 and is primarily involved in data cleaning, processing and analysis.

Debdatta Chakabarti worked as Research Associate for a year beginning May 2014. She has a Masters in Economics from Jadavpur University. Prior to IIMB, Debdatta has worked on several research projects at Jadavpur University. She is interested in using economics to understand how individuals and societies interact and function.

Ramakrishna T. R. is a Senior Field Supervisor for the India Team, and has a Master's in Law from Annamalai University and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Statistics from Bangalore University. He served in various capacities over 38 years at the National Sample Survey Organisation in Karnataka, from which he retired in 2008 as Senior Superintendent. Mr. Ramakrishna has been with this project since February 2010.

Shankarappa B. S. is a Field Supervisor for the India Team. He has Master's in Kannada Literature from Mysore University. He has worked in teaching, administrative, accounting and coordinating capacities in schools and local organizations since 2007. He has been with this study since July 2010.

Uma G. T. is a Field Supervisor for the India Team. She has a Master's in Sociology and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Human Resources Management from Kuvempu University. For her M.A. dissertation, she has done a case study of an NGO and its contribution to women’s empowerment. She has been working on this project since May 2010.