Cassava makes an important contribution to improving food security and rural incomes in sub-Saharan Africa, as it is tolerant of drought and poor soil and its cultivation does not require much labour. However, the fresh roots are bulky and perishable and need to be processed before they can be marketed; processing also removes the cyanogens which make many varieties poisonous in their raw form. Cassava roots are turned into granules, flours, pastes and chips, with a wide range of flavours and appearances for different areas and markets. Many different processing techniques are used, some of which make intensive use of fuelwood while others require a plentiful water supply. These requirements, as well as the need for a good transport and marketing infrastructure, limit the expansion of cassava production in sub-Saharan Africa, but technical solutions are being found.

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Sub-Saharan Africa is the only developing region of the world where agricultural output has been trailing population growth for most of the last three decades. Farming systems in the region are inherently risky because they are fundamentally dependent on the vagaries of weather. In addition, it is a region of crises; poverty, civil strife, and HIV/AIDS. Attention must therefore be focused on improving the production of crops that could thrive under these circumstances. Because of its tolerance of extreme drought and low input use conditions, cassava is perhaps the best candidate in this regard. And cassava is a basic food staple and a major source of farm income for the people of the region. The use of hired labor is important for its production growth because cassava root yield responds positively to the application of hired labor. This article, based on farm-level information collected from six major cassava-producing countries of Africa, within the framework of the Collaborative Study of Cassava in Africa, identifies strategic variables affecting the hired labor use decisions of producing households. The characteristics of the household head (age and number of years of formal education), the size of the household farm, good market access, and population pressure are found to motivate households to apply hired labor in cassava production. These observations underscore the need for investing in people-education-and in infrastructure-market access-as possible tools for improving food production in the region. The positive effect of farm size also suggests that some kind of land reform, which would put more farmland at the disposal of farm households, could be favorable to improving cassava production. Copyright 2005 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

It is widely reported that women provide the bulk of food production labour in Africa. Since efficient targeting of improved technologies demands an understanding of who is likely to use them, and new farm technologies have often been inappropriate for women's needs, this paper presents the relative contributions of men and women to food production labour in six major cassava-producing countries of Africa. The paper is based on farm-level information collected within the framework of the Collaborative Study of Cassava in Africa (COSCA). While the number of fields in which women provided more labour for each farm task increased consistently from the initial farm operations, such as land clearing and seedbed preparation, through sowing (planting) and weeding to the final farm operations such as harvesting and transportation, for which women provided more labour for the largest number of fields, the reverse was the case for men. The relative number of households where females provided more field labour than males was higher among female-headed households than among male-headed ones. Such households were characterized by a lower working age male/female ratio, and/or were engaged in tree crop production, which often absorbed male labour. Villages where females provided more field labour than males were more common in remote areas where access to markets was poor and population density sparse, or in countries where men had fled the villages because of political repression. Such villages were also more common among non-Muslim communities than among predominantly Muslim societies. On the whole, however, men contributed more labour in significantly more fields than women in most places. These observations suggest that it could be misleading to generalize that women are providing the bulk of food production labour across Africa. They provide clear evidence of gender division of labour on the farm, and help to explain gender bias in agricultural extension efforts in Africa. Recommendations that pre-harvest extension activities should be mainly directed at women have hardly been heeded. It is recommended that these activities should be targeted at both men and women, but more towards women where men have fled the villages for political reasons or for commercial ones such as poor market access opportunities.

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