ABSTRACT
In the past, it was often found convenient to adopt a view of the household as a coherent decision-making unit, a ‘black box’, with an integrated system of producing crops, livestock or incomes, and unified access to the resources needed to obtain them. Decisions of all the members were regarded as somehow summed in the household head, usually the person to be interviewed. The inadequacy of this view is obvious. Smallholder households do not consist only of standardised units of production and consumption, subjected to authoritarian decisions, but of individuals, structured by age and gender, whose decisions interact in a complex way. In this chapter, our objective is to move from the analysis of household labour use in the aggregate to a focus on the contributions made by women and children to securing household livelihoods, in particular in farming during the season.
