ABSTRACT
The incidence of female headship is believed to have increased worldwide and, in both developed and developing countries, a high proportion of these households are found to suffer poverty (Chant 1997). Thus female-headed households have become an easily identifiable group on which to target poverty alleviation measures. However, the efficacy of such targeting has been widely questioned (Kennedy and Haddad 1994; Blackden and Bhanu 1999; Quisumbing et al. 2001, Chant 2003). Female headship results from a variety of causes – widowhood, divorce and de facto headship, arising, for instance, from the illness of a spouse or his migration to an urban area to find work – and consequently does not always map directly into poverty and deprivation. More work is needed to understand the relationship of forms of female headship to access to resources and the consequent effects on the ability to improve the household’s position. Only when such links are documented can poverty alleviation measures be effectively and efficiently targeted.
