Changes in income-generating activities

SAP policies of retrenchment of workers from the public sector meant increasing unemployment and an influx of retrenched workers into the formal sector at the national level. In Zorse, with only 2 per cent of women engaged in the formal sector, there was very little change in the number of women engaged in an income earning activity between 1984 and 1991. However, there were changes in the types of income generating work over the seven year period, with more women undertaking farming and food processing rather than trading in 1991 (table 15.3).

This may suggest that women are cashing in on the higher prices of crops as a result of SAP policies, as found in a study among women in southern Nigeria (Guyer and Idowu 1991). In Zorse, however, the incentive to move into farming was not the higher producer prices of food crops, since these are produced at a higher cost, but survival. As most women farmers put it, "at least with farming, one's children would not go hungry."