Doctoral thesis
There are markedly significant relationships between gender roles and food insecurity among agro-pastoral communities of Chamwino and Chemba Districts in Tanzania. However, little is known on the importance of gender roles on resilience to food insecurity. The main objective of the study was to investigate the influence of gender roles on resilience to food insecurity at the household level among agro-pastoral communities in Chamwino and Chemba Districts in Tanzania. Specifically; to examine gender roles related to food insecurity, to determine food insecurity status, to determine the employed resilience mechanism in response to food insecurity, and finally to assess how gender roles influence resilience mechanism to food insecurity.
The study employed a cross-sectional research design where primary data were collected from 333 randomly selected households through survey, focus group discussion, key informant interviews, and observation methods. Secondary data were collected from common sources including published, unpublished data, books, magazines, newspapers, and journals. Qualitative data were analyzed through narratives and content analysis while IBM SPSS Statistics Version 24 was used to analyze quantitative data.
The findings indicated that there are gender roles related to food insecurity these include; cooking, allocation, distribution, and preservation of food. Others are caring for children and sick people, addressing of seasonal variations, and searching for wild food. However, the findings also show that there is still high food insecurity situation particularly the mildly insecure category in the study area, and women are reported as the most food insecure than men. Moreover, the determined resilience mechanism used were, absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience indices with Mean indices of 51.477, 46.794, and 55.242, respectively and the differences between them were statistically significant at p=0.000. Also, resilience had positive coefficients (β) for districts, sex, household size, age, additional sources of income, number(s) livestock and background of individual (indigenous) as; 4.495, 2.223, 2.114, 0.012, 1.334, 0.010, 0.001 respectively. Findings also revealed that gender roles that showed a positive correlation on resilience to food insecurity include roles to take care of children and sick people, cooking, preparations of alternative food, controlling financial capital, distribution and allocation of food. Women are more resilient than men regardless of higher food insecurity situations.
For a vibrant and resilient community, different interventions should be done by stakeholders including policy and decision-makers to consider gender roles and their relevance on resilience to food insecurity.