A gender and decent work analysis of cassava production and on-farm processing , in Kuria west sub-county , Kenya

In Kenya, cassava (Manihot esculenta) is one of the strategic crops with the ability to withstand adverse climatic conditions. It thrives well in areas with little rainfall such as Kuria west sub-county. It is an important food security crop for resource poor households and has a high potential for value addition. With limited range of crop and livestock farm enterprises that can be raised, cassava production engages all gender and age groups within the household. However, the level of men and women involvement in cassava production and on-farm processes and whether this constitutes decent work as defined by International Labour Organization (ILO) has not been evaluated. Data was collected from 224 systematically selected farmers drawn from four wards where cassava farming and processing activities are evenly distributed. A sampling frame was established from the sub-county farmers’ list. The first farmer was selected using lottery method and then the subsequent respondent was selected using a calculated sampling interval until the sample size was reached. Descriptive statistics and ordinary least square (OLS) econometric analysis were used to analyze the data. Likert results showed that women were more involved than men in the production and on-farm processing with means of 2.6 and 1.4 respectively on a 4 point scale. OLS results showed that age, extension contacts, credit access and experience significantly affected the level of involvement of both women and men at 95% confidence level. Some 68 and 92% were not aware of National Social Security Fund (NSSF) and National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) respectively. About 65% used protective gear during work and the hourly wage earned was 44% higher than the minimum set by the government of Kenya. More civic education needs to be done to improve the participation by men and the decent work status in the Kuria west sub county.


INTRODUCTION
Commercialization of agricultural activities among smallholder households has been touted as a crucial means of achieving food security.It increases income for households, and promotes efficient use of scarce resources in rural areas leading to faster development (Dannson et al., 2004).Food losses due to low levels of value addition have also exacerbated the levels of food insecurity.In recent times, however, agriculturists and extension workers in Kenya have incorporated the development of entrepreneurial capabilities among rural farm households and the commercialization of traditional crops production such as cassava into their agenda.
Cassava, one of the traditional crops that have been identified for promotion as it has the ability to withstand adverse climatic conditions and is also has a high potential for value addition (GoK, 2005).Cassava is ideal for production and provision of carbohydrates in the marginal and drought-prone areas, which comprise about 80% of Kenya.However, its potential utilization as a food security crop remains low in these areas.A major constraint to cassava production is lack of adequate disease and pest-free planting materials greatly exacerbated by its low multiplication rate (Githunguri et al., 2014).
Cassava is therefore a crop of primary importance for food security of farmers living in fragile ecosystems and socially unstable environments.Once harvested, it can be transformed into an industrial raw material in the manufacture of starch, baked products, paper, alcohol and animal feeds among others (FAO, 1999) In Kenya cassava is the third most important food security crop from maize and Irish potatoes, (GOK, 2010).
Utilization of cassava in Kenya is varied depending on the locality.For instance Abong et al. (2016) revealed that cassava processing is predominantly (58%) a woman affair, males accounting for 42% with modal processors age being 32 years.Flour was the most common processed cassava product on Coast region (33%) while dried chips was highly produced in Migori and Busia (western region) in equal proportion of 43%.Other important products included cassava crisps and composite flour.Coast region had a greater diversity of products which are nonexistent in other regions.Most of processing across the regions are small scale with workers mostly being the owners and activities take place in open yards with majority of these being in Busia (85%) followed by Migori (67%) and coast region (57%).Constraints during cassava processing were ranked in the following order: Irregular and inadequate supply coupled with low seasonal demand for cassava and cassava products; high perishability of the tubers, lack of value addition and processing tools, poor group dynamics, cohesion and management structure; lack of capacity building in production and processing technologies.There is very limited value addition to cassava in the study regions and hence the need to develop innovative technologies as well as new domestic and industrial products.
However, recent advances have seen cassava value addition in Rachuonyo, Nyanza region, at three levels: Level 1-Post-harvest level/primary processing: Proper cleaning, grading and packaging sweet potato tuber roots for sales which is the most common type practiced by most farmers.Level 2 -Secondary/ basic processing, packaging and branding: Such as grinding sweet potatoes into flour and packing the flour into different respective sizes.Level 3 -High end processing: Such as actual cooking to get potato chips, noodles, candy,desserts, mandazi, chapatti, buns, biscuits, bread and Karukaru, making potato juice or actual packaging of processed foods, branding, and marketing (Oluoch et al., 2016).Apart from these, processed flour is bought by poultry farmers as animal feed, also by bakeries and other food service providers.To ensure nothing goes to waste, the plant leaves and stems are used for animal feed (Muturi, 2015).
Studies have shown that cassava is mainly grown by smallholders in mixed cropping with many other crops, and lately in sole crop stands (National Policy on Cassava Industry, 2005).The crop has higher farm returns compared to maize in Kuria West Sub County and is the main staple food.However, the average production per hectare is 6.8 tonnes (GOK, 2010).This performance could be explained by many factors among them gender aspects and decent work attributes.Commercialization of cassava sector necessarily brings with it a 'demand pull' that leads to an increase in domestic production with greater demand for the crop, farmers can be encouraged to grow high yielding varieties and the use of improved agronomic and other post-harvest practices (Adebayo et al., 2013).
Effective application of agricultural technologies in production has strategic gender implications.According to Odii (1996), rural development policies directed at the household may not have their intended effects or produce unintended negative outcomes, unless the role and position of gender in rural households are explicitly taken into account.
Ignoring gender roles in agricultural interventions comes at a great cost to people's well-being and countries' ability to reduce food insecurity and poverty.In Kenya, for example, giving the same attention to men and women in an agricultural progamme or project results to an increase in output by 20% (World Bank, 2005).
The decent work agenda is also a critical component in enhancing agricultural production and food security as envisaged in the International Labour Organization report (ILO) (2003).Cassava offers many employment (including self -employment) opportunities along the production and on-farm processing.The production and processing activities include, land and planting material preparation, planting, weeding, harvesting ,peeling, slicing to chips, drying, and grinding into flour (AIC, 2002).Due to the influence they have on the quality of life, the employment opportunities during production and processing of cassava can have higher expected results if carried out within the decent work concept.The criteria for decent work defined by ILO are: Productive work, health and safety, social security and social dialogue to both employees and the self -employed (Somavia, 1999).ILO has developed indicators for decent work for the four pillars including, minimum wage, safe and risk free working environment, access to an insurance fund and pension scheme, and collective bargaining (Anker et al., 2002).
Consequently, in Kuria west sub-county, since the crop is labour intensive, the gender roles in the different activities along the production and on-farm processing have not been established.Further, it has not been evaluated whether all the activities in the production and on-farm processing constitute decent and productive employment.Gainful employment can enhance enterprise production thus improving food security in the household.These were achieved through the following objectives: To analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of farmers involved in cassava production and on-farm processing; to determine the level of involvement by men and women in cassava production and on-farm processing activities; to determine the factors that affect involvement in cassava production and on-farm processing; to compare the working conditions of cassava farmers with the ILO standards of decent work.

The study area
This study was conducted in Kuria west Sub-county of Migori County.It is the southern-most sub county bordering Tanzania to the South-West (Figure 1).To the East it shares its borders with Kuria East and to North is Migori.The sub-county covers an area of 394.7 Km 2 of which 94.8% is arable and 75.6% is cultivated.It is unique in that it is agriculturally endowed with two distinct agroclimatic zones; the Upper Midlands (UM) and Lower Midlands (LM) compared to the other sub-counties of Migori at the lower altitude ranges.Food crops grown including maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, millet and sorghum.Cassava is traditionally the main food crop.It forms part of the daily ration for almost all the households in the sub county.Livestock reared are local cattle, goats, sheep and poultry.

Sampling procedure and data collection
Data was collected from 224 systematically selected farmers drawn from four wards where cassava farming and processing activities are evenly distributed.A sampling frame was established from the sub-county farmers' list using the formula K=N/n, where, K is the sampling interval; N is the population size and n is the sample size.The first farmer was selected using lottery method but the subsequent respondents were selected by taking every K th farmer from the list.
The sample size was determined by using (Kothari, 1990): Where n is the sample size, Z is the desired level of confidence, p is the proportion of the population producing and processing cassava is known (MoA, 2015) and E is the absolute size of the error in estimating the value of p that the researcher is willing to permit; q = 1-p.A 95% level of confidence (Z= 1.96), with an allowable error of 0.055.With these values; p = 0.82, q = 1-0.Therefore, this resulted in a sample size of 226 respondents who were divided proportionally to the ratio of the total number farmers in the sampled wards as shown in Table 1.

Conceptual framework
The conceptual framework of the study is given in Figure 2.

Data analysis
To describe the socio-economic characteristics descriptive statistics such as percentages and means were used.The base for comparing the earnings from cassava activities was the minimum wage as set by the government of Kenya, while the other decent work variables were compared with the ILO standards.The level of participation in cassava production and processing activities was analyzed using a participation index.The index was constructed using a 4 point Likert scale after Ayoade et al. (2009).The participation was measured on scale 1 to 4 in order of involvement from; never involved = 1; rarely involved = 1.1 -1.9; sufficiently involved = 2 -2.9; always involved = 3 to 3.9.The mean score for each of the activities was calculated and the grand mean score of all the practices was divided by the number of activities to determine the level of participation of each gender in cassava production and on-farm processing in the area.The factors that affect participation in cassava production and processing were analyzed using Ordinary Least Square regression model where the mean participation index was used as the endogenous variable in the regression model: Where Yi is the participation index calculated as a mean of the activities the respondent participated in,  is a vector of the individual's characteristics and  is a vector of parameters.
The explicit form, of the model was specified as:

Socio-economic characteristics
Table 2 presents t-test results ( 95% confidence level) for equality of means for age, household size, farm size, education farm incomes cassava experience, credit access and group participation between men and women involved in cassava production and on-farm processing.The results show that there was a significant difference between means of men and women in house hold sizes, farm sizes and education.However there was no significant difference between them in the other variables.
The larger house hold sizes of men headed over women headed are explained by the polygamous nature of the Kuria community emanating from early marriages of teenage girls (Magangi, 2013).On average, men were more educated than women due to the retrogressive culture of female genital mutilation which signifies passage from childhood to womanhood at an early age (Ondiek, 2010).
This effectively terminates girls' education and compels them to engage in household and farm activities such as cassava production Further analysis was done on the socio-economic characteristics to demonstrate their distribution among the households.Results presented in Table 3 show that the modal class of cassava farmers was between 31 and 44 years for both men and women.This represents about 49.1 and 38.8% of men and women respectively indicating that majority of the farmers in the sub county were in their middle and active age of life.This is supportive to cassava production and processing.Similar findings by Onuebunwa and Adesope (2006) and    2007) have revealed that men and women between early 30's to early 50's take active part in food crop production.It is instructive in that the younger generation has a lower level of involvement since cassava is regarded as a poor man's crop (Nyamwange, 1995).The marital status is shown on Table 4 and gives the evidence that 73.3% of women and 98.1% of men were in marriage while 23.3% of women were widows and only 3.4% were single.This means that majority of cassava farmers in the sub county are in a family setup where roles are defined by the culture.This has an influence on the overall management in terms of resource allocation, production techniques as well as processing and marketing.
The modal class of the house hold sizes was that of between 5 and 7 people per household at 67.2 and 56.5% for women and men, respectively as shown in Table 5.The results are consistent with GoK (2013) that the average household size in Kenya is 5.1 persons.It is important to note that the category of 8 to 10 persons was more prevalent in men headed households (28.7%) due to polygamy.The importance of family size is that cassava production is labour intensive and larger households signify more land being put under the crop (Tana, 2011).
The income accruing from production and processing of cassava is somewhat the same for both women (KES 3292) and men (3383) as shown in Table 6.Such low incomes are because they live in the same environment and face the same markets with little linkage with external markets.Indeed, Mumbi et al. (2008) revealed that farmers mainly supply to local trading centers where the wholesale or retail cassava are dried or sliced.Their participation along the distribution channel is mostly active at farm gate level, local trading centers, and market retail systems.Other findings have shown that farmers who were in farming and marketing groups were more involved in value addition.This is because they could benefit from collective marketing due to a stronger bargaining power compared to those who did not belong to any marketing group.The ready markets for value added products were a motivation for most of them to be involved in value addition at all levels (Oluoch et al., 2016).Experience in cassava production was s not distinctly different for both men and women suggesting that it was introduced to the area at the same time though women had a slightly early lead in its uptake.

Level of involvement of men and women in cassava production and on-farm processing
Table 7 presents results of the level of involvement per gender in the nine cassava production and on-farm processing activities.The findings show that women were involved more in peeling and grating as well as sufficiently involved in planting, milling, cuttings preparation, and gathering of planting materials.However they were rarely involved in land preparation as shown by a low mean participation index of 1.7 Men on the other hand were sufficiently involved in land preparation with a high mean index of 2.6 while they would rarely engage in peeling grating and milling indicated by an index of less than 1.The mean level of involvement in all the activities per gender was 2.6 for women and 1.4 for men, indicating that women were about twice sufficiently involved in cassava production and on-farm processing activities as compared to men.This result is significantly different at 1%.The findings match those of Okolo (1986) that cassava is women's crop.However, increased productivity through GM material could alter the power relations between men and women, as more output might encourage men to sell the crops in markets, giving them, rather than women access to much-needed cash (James et al., 2014).
Other findings such as UNDP (2012) found that of those involved in cassava production in Uganda 65% were women.However, Nweke (2005) in a review of cassava in Africa revealed that both men and women made significant contributions of their labour to the cassava industry in most of the COSCA countries though they distinctly specialized in different tasks.Whereas men worked predominantly on land clearing, ploughing and planting, women specialized in weeding, harvesting, transporting and processing.

Women involvement
The result of ordinary least squares multiple regression for women involvement are presented in Table 8.Though the coefficients of multiple determinations (R 2) is not high (0.48), the model was statistically significant and had low standard errors at 95% confidence level.
The results show that there was significant (p<0.05) and positive relationship between women level of involvement in cassava production and on-farm processing and age, number of extension visits, credit access, and experience in cassava production and processing.
Age had a significant (p<0.05)but negative relationship with women involvement in cassava production and processing.This implies that as women grow older their level of involvement in cassava activities reduces.This is contrary to a priori expectation.The reason for this is that as age increases the productivity of their labour goes down since cassava is a labour intensive crop.It can also be adduced that since they live in an extended family set up, the younger women in the family assist the older ones more so because cassava is grown as a food crop.
As women got more contact with extension agents, they became more involved in cassava production and on-farm processing suggesting that they received positive information on the enterprise.Access to credit increased the involvement by women in the cassava activities.This is plausible since production and processing activities require finances.The results concur with Damisa et al. (2007).

Men involvement
Table 9 shows that there was significant (p<0.05) and positive relationship between level of involvement in cassava production and on-farm processing by men and number of extension visits, credit access, experience in production and processing and group participation.
More extension contacts serve as a source of varied information as relates to cassava in totality.Kessy and Temu (2010) noted that training shapes human motivation factors necessary for engagement in the practice being promoted.Farm activities require funding and credit is one source of funds.Access to credit was positive and significant at 1% suggesting that an additional unit of credit will increase the level of men involvement in cassava activities by about 9%.Findings by Nzomo and Muturi (2014) showed that agricultural credit has the capacity to enhance the income of farmers who utilize it by more than 100%.The positive coefficient for experience suggests that the longer men participate in cassava enterprise, the more they appreciate the benefits and hence increase their involvement in its production and processing.Farmers with more years of experience acquire knowledge and skills necessary for choosing appropriate farming technologies (Faturoti et al., 2006).
The benefits inherent in group membership include access to inputs at reduced price due to bulk purchase, subsidized transport and improved credit access as they guarantee each other.Expectedly, group membership increased men's involvement in cassava production and on-farm processing activities.

Decent work activities
The decent work issues addressed in this section include hourly payments, access to social security, hospital insurance fund, and safety measures.

Hourly payments
Productive work is one that generates enough income to an individual that will take care of the basic needs for a decent lifestyle.According to the Kenya Gazette (2015), KES 54.7 is the minimum hourly pay set for gardeners as per the schedule for other areas where Kuria west subcounty falls.However, results in Table 10 show the average hourly pay for carrying out cassava production and on-farm processing activities was KES 78.054.This is 44.4% higher than the set minimum by the government of Kenya and is significantly different with a p-value of 0.000 at 95% confidence level.There was no significant difference (p<0.05) between men and women earnings per hour.It can be adduced that cassava activities generate productive income to the farmers involved in the production and on-farm processing.

Social security fund
From Table 11 the farmers who were not aware of National Social Security Fund (NSSF) services or any other social security fund were 68%.While 32% were aware, only 15.6% of the farmers were contributing to the National social security fund.The proportion (15.6%) of those contributing is not significantly different from the Kenya national target of 20% of eligible persons to be members of a social security fund at 95% confidence level with a p-value of 0.0733.However it was significantly different at 90% level.The main reason given by the other half (16.5 percent) that was aware but not contributing was that the services were not accessible to them Further, 13.4% of cassava farmers financed their NSSF contributions from other sources while only 2.2% financed from cassava production and on-farm processing activities.The low level of contributions from cassava activities is in line with ILO (2010) report on social security scheme which reported a less than 1% membership to the NSSF by members from the informal sector.

National hospital insurance fund
Results showed that the level of awareness of NHIF services among the cassava farmers was high at almost 92% as shown in Table 12.The results revealed that 65.6% of the farmers involved in cassava production and on-farm processing were contributing to the NHIF scheme.This is not significant (P<0.05)from the current national coverage of 59.9% (Jamah, 2015).However, 5% of the farmers could not access the services while 21.4% could not afford the amount required for the NHIF contributions.
On sources of funds to the scheme, 37.9% of the cassava farmers used money from other sources to finance the scheme while 27.6% used money generated from cassava production and on-farm processing activities.

Safety measures
Table 13 shows the safety measures undertaken by the farmers involved in cassava production and on-farm processing.The results disclosed that 64.7% of the farmers involved in cassava production and on-farm processing used some level of protective gear for safety during the operations.Gumboots are the most commonly used protective gear with 62% of the farmers confirming their use.Only 24.5% used hand gloves while 11.6 and 2% used dust masks and aprons respectively.Some of the farmers combined the protective gears used during the operations.

Conclusions
There was no comparative advantage to either gender in cassava production and on-farm processing because socio-economic characteristics of both were not significant.The participation index showed that the level who did this study towards his Master's thesis but could not achieve its end due to a tragic road accident.They appreciate the support he got from his family, friends, and colleagues.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Map of Kuria West Sub County.Source: World Resources Institute, Egerton University.

Table 1 .
Sampling distribution and size.
Social economic variables  Age  Marital status  House hold size  Education level  Farm size  Farming experience  Income  Decent work agenda Institutional variables  Access to extension  Access to land  Access to credit facilities  Access to farm labour  Access to market  Membership to a

Table 2 .
Test for equality of means of socio-economic characteristics of men and women cassava farmers.

Table 3 .
Age distribution of cassava farmers by gender in percentage.

Table 4 .
Marital status of cassava farmers by gender in percentage.

Table 5 .
House hold size of cassava farmers by gender in percentage.

Table 6 .
Income and experience in cassava activities by gender.

Table 7 .
Level of involvement of cassava farmers in production and on-farm processing by gender.

Table 8 .
Factors affecting women level of involvement in cassava production and on-farm processing.

Table 9 .
Factors affecting men level of involvement in cassava production and on-farm processing.

Table 10 .
Hourly payments of cassava farmers for cassava activities on average in Kenya shillings.

Table 11 .
NSSF status of cassava farmers in percentage.

Table 12 .
NHIF status of cassava farmers in percentage.