CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 117Income, Poverty, and InequalityGender, Labor, and Family DynamicsHIV/AIDS Impact and Responses

Missing men? The debate over rural poverty and women‐headed households in Southern Africa

O'laughlin, Bridget·1998·The Journal of Peasant Studies
DOI 10.1080/03066159808438665
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Migrant labour in Southern Africa is associated historically with rural poverty and a high incidence of women‐headed households. Poverty alleviation approaches to social policy ask whether in this context rural women‐headed households are poorer than those headed by men. Ample research from the region shows that the answer is not always, a finding once more confirmed here in an analysis of Botswana. This case suggests, however, that the wrong question is being asked. The incidence of both women‐headed households and rural poverty has increased with the polarisation of agrarian production and the exclusionary restructuring of the migrant labour system. We need to ask not whom to target, but what should be done when capital no longer needs the labour that it pulled from rural households over so many generations.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/03066159808438665

Cites

69 of 69 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • A focus on households as a unit potentially ignores many important intra-household relations and sometimes results in emphasising male livelihood activities, to the exclusion of women and young people.

    “For example, a focus on households as a unit potentially ignores many important intra-household relations, and results sometimes in the emphasising of male livelihood activities, to the exclusion of women and young people (Guyer and Peters, 1987;O'Laughlin, 1998).”

    From Livelihood Change in Rural Zimbabwe over 20 Years (2012) · cites this paper as O'Laughlin, 1998

  • Women may benefit through improved living conditions, investments in education, and funds for their own business, but the marital contract within households becomes key in negotiating access to these resources.

    “Womenmay well benefit, through improved living conditions, investments in education, and funds for their own business, but the marital contract within households becomes key in negotiating access to these resources (O'Laughlin, 1998).”

    From Tobacco, contract farming, and agrarian change in Zimbabwe (2018) · cites this paper as O'Laughlin, 1998

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

3 of the 72 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
O'laughlin, B.
Venue
The Journal of Peasant Studies
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
1998-01
Volume
25
Issue
2
Pages
1-48
ISSN
  • 0306-6150 (ISSN-L)
  • 1743-9361
DOI
10.1080/03066159808438665
OpenAlex
W1977971987
Cited by
117
References
72
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 10
FWCI
18.91
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
The Journal of Peasant Studies (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Income, Poverty, and Inequality
  • Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses
Keywords
rural poverty, female-headed households, migrant labour, Southern Africa, Botswana, poverty reduction, social policy targeting, rural women, labor-capital relations

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review