Contribution of Men and Women to Farming Decisions in Cocoa Based Agroforestry Housholds of Ekiti State, Nigeria

Women are key players in the agricultural sector of most developing countries of the world. Despite this major role, however, the men have reportedly continued to dominate farm decision making, even in areas where women are the largest providers of farm labour. This could be counter productive, because there is bound to be conflict when women, as key players, carry out farm tasks without being part of the decision process, especially when the decisions fail to recognize their other peculiar household responsibilities. Previous efforts at estimating women's role in agriculture have tended to concentrate on evaluating their labour contributions. There has been little farm-level information regarding their role in farm decision making, particularly in male dominated cash crop environment like cocoa agro-forestry households. This paper aims to bridge this information gap. The paper is based on farm level data collected in Ekiti State, southwest Nigeria, from 120 randomly selected farm units. The results of the analysis show that in general, while women were responsible for food crop production activities decisions, men were in charge of decisions regarding cocoa production activities. This fails to confirm dominance by any gender in farm decision making but rather shows a clear gender division of labour in this regards. This corroborates the observation by Enete et al. (18) on gender division of labour regarding farm labour supply across six countries of Africa.