This article examines the impact of male out-migration on the workload and status of the women left behind in rural Nepal. The study uses primary data collected through household surveys from two districts in the mid-hills of Nepal to analyze aspects of women’s roles and responsibilities that are expected to change in the absence of male household heads. Specifically, the study focuses on the change in women’s workload, the expansion of their roles, their ownership and access to productive resources, and the part they play in household decision making. The results suggest that women have broadened and deepened their involvement in rural society as a result of male out-migration, which could lead to either the empowerment or disempowerment of women. The nature and extent of this impact was conditional on the migration pattern and the remittances received by the households. Larger remittances generally helped to reduce the physical work burden and to increase decision-making roles, thus empowering the women left behind. But low remittances had the opposite impact, and saddled them with greater physical workload.

Although international migration is playing an increasingly important role in Nepal, at both the macro and household levels, and in particular for the poverty reduction of rural families, empirical work focusing on this phenomenon has been largely absent. With a special view on the rural poor, in this paper we investigate the impact of international labour migration on subsistence agricultural production in the Western Mid Hills of Nepal, based on a survey conducted among smallholders with migrating family members. The results demonstrate that international migration leads to negligence of cereals – paddy, wheat, maize and millet, in particular, being the major subsistence crops. While bearing a negative impact on family labour input, its impact on hired farm labour is positive. Yet it does not affect material inputs such as fertilizer, and although it helps to ease households’ liquidity and capital constraints, it does not contribute to moving subsistence farming towards more profitable commercial farming. Therefore, although migration reduces poverty in the short run and also allows for higher daily consumption, its negative impact on cereal production requires attention by policymakers.

Labour migration is traditionally considered to be a way of protecting household members at the migrant's place of origin from economic pitfalls by receipt of remittances. More recently, young urban migrants from rural regions have been observed to neglect their traditional obligations to support their elderly parents, especially if they do not intend to return to their native village, do not expect any sizeable inheritance and have no reciprocal insurance commitment with their parents. Under such circumstances, rural people are exposed to the risk of staying without support in times of economic crises or during their old age. This paper analyses the potential of migration with remittance strategies in stabilizing the income of rural households. The analytical results are based on a microeconomic survey from Cameroon in 1991/92. A Probit model is applied to analyse access to remittances and a Tobit model to look into their extent. A major result of this analysis is that migration with remittance strategies fails as a social security mechanism when the potential remitter does not expect any sizeable inheritance.

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Several countries in Central Africa face challenges of low food production and high incidences of poverty, particularly in rural areas. Several programs initiated in the region to increase food production and commercialization among smallholder farmers have had limited success. Over 80% of the farm households grow bananas and legumes as staple crops. We evaluate the impact of commercialization of these crops on‐farm income and the dietary diversity of rural households in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We employ three methods: propensity score matching, endogenous switching regression, and IPTW on cross‐sectional data. We find that commercialization has a robust and positive significant effect on dietary diversity and farm income, even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across the households. In particular, commercialization increases household incomes by 67% and dietary diversity by 11%. We find strong evidence of the impact of commercialization on incomes but little evidence of dietary diversity of rural households. Wider policy recommendations to raise the capacity of smallholders to produce for the market and improve their livelihoods are discussed. [EconLit citations: Q13, Q12, Q11]