Drought, Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

Bibliographic Data

ID4846499
AuthorsM D Turner (0000-0001-8791-9367, University of Wisconsin–Madison, corresponding author), Matthew Turner (0000-0002-9843-0679)
Year2000
Volume31
Issue5
Pages1009-1035
Publication date2000-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDevelopment and Change (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0012-155X • E-ISSN: 1467-7660
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-7660.00187
OpenAlexW2161943575
LanguageEN
Citations received15

Over the past twenty-five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land-derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case-by-case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals' decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one's position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty-four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household's land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984

Agricultural economics · Business · Distribution (mathematics) · Distribution of wealth · Economics · Geography · Inequality · Wealth distribution · Agricultural risk and resilience · Mathematics · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare

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