Polygyny and Farm Households' Resilience to Climate Shocks
Climate change and weather shocks pose major challenges for household income security and well-being, especially for smallholder farmers’ communities. In such communities, imperfect risk insurance and labor markets may induce households to use trad...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/357711620918404250/Polygyny-and-Farm-Households-Resilience-to-Climate-Shocks http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35611 |
| Summary: | Climate change and weather shocks pose
major challenges for household income security and
well-being, especially for smallholder farmers’ communities.
In such communities, imperfect risk insurance and labor
markets may induce households to use traditional
institutions such as polygyny to harness their size and
composition to their resilience strategies against these
shocks. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing how
polygyny’s interaction with droughts affects crop yields.
For identification, the paper relies on the spatial
variation in polygyny’s prevalence across Mali’s rural
communes and the randomness of drought episodes. The
findings show that polygynous communities are more resilient
to drought-induced crop failure. Exploration of the
mechanisms shows that polygynous communities diversify their
income sources more than monogamous ones, including via
child marriage—a phenomenon known to undermine women’s
outcomes. As the literature links polygyny to
underdevelopment, interventions to eliminate it should make
formal resilience and adaptation strategies available to
drought-prone communities. Failure to do so may entrench
political opposition to enforcing a ban on polygyny and
child marriage. |
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