Motivation
Burkina Faso ranks lower than most Sub-Saharan African countries on the Global Gender Gap Index1. This gap in gender equality can be primarily attributed to women being relegated to low-value crop production and agribusiness activities and women’s limited access to resources. Additionally, gender norms require women to prioritize household duties over economic participation. Within the shea butter production industry in Burkina Faso, a lucrative and integrated part of the global supply chain, women have the potential to progress up the value chain. Shea butter production is organized into cooperatives that collect women’s nut production centrally and compensate them in cash. However, the management of this process is completely manual, resulting in problems such as reduced transparency, errors, delays, leakage of funds, and a lack of privacy. The absence of an efficient quality verification process also reduces incentives to improve nut quality. Consequently, payments to women are lower. This study will explore whether improving access to digitized payment services and automated quality traceability systems reduces payment delays and fund leakages, improves women’s privacy and safety, and increases expected returns from higher value production, ultimately impacting women’s economic empowerment (WEE).
Objective
The two primary objectives of this project are to investigate whether payment digitization (PD) is effective in advancing WEE, and whether automated product quality traceability can encourage women to invest more. The research team will answer these questions by evaluating whether PD increases efficiency by reducing delays in payments and leakages of funds, and by improving women’s privacy and safety. The study will also incorporate automated product traceability (PT) to evaluate whether there is an increase in expected returns to investing in higher value production. 3,000 shea nut farmers will be randomized into two treatment groups, one receiving only PD and the other receiving both PD and PT. Surveys will collect data measuring bargaining power, time use, thefts, agricultural investments (focusing on labor supply) and outcomes, and socioeconomic outcomes. Formative qualitative research will also inform the design of lab-in-the-field experiments of bargaining power to better understand gender roles and empowerment issues.
