Risk Of Eviction And Women’s Technology Adoption: Some Evidence From Southwestern Nigeria

In the presence of tenure insecurity that many women face in developing societies because of patriarchal norms, farmers may not adopt farm technologies because there is no assurance of reaping the benefits. This article examines how the risk of eviction affects women’s fertilizer use and adoption of early maturing seed varieties. For the empirical analysis, I employ individual-level data that was collected from 180 women rice farmers in southwestern Nigeria with a multistage sampling technique and analyse the data with both econometric methods that address possible endogeneity issues and those that do not. I analyse the relationship between the risk of eviction and fertilizer use with the Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) methods and analyse the relationship between the risk of eviction and the adoption of early-maturing seed varieties with the Two Stage Conditional Maximum Likelihood (2SCML) and probit methods. I find women who are cultivating family-allocated, husband-allocated and purchased plots to be significantly less likely to have fears of eviction than those who are cultivating fixed-rent plots, even as the risk of eviction have different effects on fertilizer use and on the adoption of early-maturing rice varieties respectively. While it makes the women spend less on fertilizer, it makes them more likely to adopt early maturing seed varieties. These would suggest that the women are responding to the unfavourable production environment from tenure insecurity with lower investments in soil fertility and shortened time horizons towards minimizing their losses in the event of eviction. The results also suggest that the women may invest in soil fertility if the operating environment becomes more favourable with better tenure. The policy implications of the findings are thus evident. Women are evidently not averse to adopting farm technologies by default; to thus improve adoption rates of farm technologies, policymakers should adapt technologies to local socioeconomic conditions, while exploring how to make tenancy contracts and the social norms that underpin customary tenure systems more amenable to granting women tenure security. These would help protect land resources from degradation, make agricultural incomes sustainable, and facilitate socio-economic development.