Volume 1, Number 2
March 1995

Female-Headed Households: A Useful Disaggregation or a Misleading Aggregation?

Diane Russell at USAID's Center for Development Information and Evaluation brought to the attention of the network a paper by Hamid Tabatai of the International Labour Organization (ILO) (Tabatai 1993) that stated that female-headed households in urban Zaire (Kinshasa and Bandundu) had a lower poverty rate than did male-headed households. Diane pointed out that her own work with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) in Bandundu showed that the female-headed category is extremely heterogeneous and not a particularly useful category per se for analytical purposes. Lynn Brown of IFPRI concurred with Diane, and pointed out that her work on Lesotho also showed that, as a group, female-headed households were not poorer. However, she notes that many of the female-headed households were de facto in the sense that they were the recipients of migrant remittance flows from spouses working in South Africa.

Margreet Zwarteveen at International Irrigation Management Institute (IIMI) joined in the dialogue, commenting that often the tendency to try to associate female-headed households to poverty is motivated by an eagerness to show the importance of women rather than analytical correctness. Margreet points out that the category of female-headed household needs to be contextualized. In Nepal, she states many de facto female-headed households are among the best-off in terms of income and, moreover, women have more autonomy. In Bangladesh, husbands may desert their wives due to poverty (the chance to obtain another dowry) and leave their families in poverty. In Sri Lanka, female-headed farm households are often poorer than husband-wife households simply because they lack access to male labor. In Tanzania, studies by Marjorie Mbilinyi indicate that male claims on female labor may cause women to leave their husbands and children for the towns. The children in such male-only households may be most vulnerable because female remittances are not spent effectively by the man.