Women's Economic Activities, Household Decision Making & Child Welfare in Manabi, Ecuador

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Economic development projects in the underdeveloped world after World War 2 focused on generating income for men, assuming that the men would distribute the benefits to women and children. After decades of experiences development specialists realized that the income frequently was not fairly distributed -- the welfare of women and children was often ignored. For the past 20 years projects have attempted to focus on women as the primary caretakers of children. This project evaluates one form of development project -- a cooperative food processing plant -- in its impact on women's abilities to control resources and improve the well-being of their children. This award to the University 0f Pittsburgh supports an ethnographic project to study the effects of poor rural Ecuadorian women's participation in economic development projects on their household economic and health well-being. The research will take place in four communities, two which were the sites of cooperative development projects, and two which were not. The project will document the control of income and other resources by women, examine household decision making concerning household resources, and study the impact of participation in income generating activities on the health and nutritional status of women and children. The hypothesis to be tested is that activity by women in cooperative projects positively affects the well-being of their children. Both ethnographic and survey data will be gathered on a broad range of variables including social participation, community investment in social welfare and health, individual perceptions of the importance and social worth of men and women, as well as anthropometric and nutritional data, to assess the welfare of a sample of households in the study villages. This research is important because economic development can not be successful without significant improvement in the welfare of women and children. New knowledge which assesses the significance of different strategies of improving welfare will be useful to planners and governments in designing better ways to improve rural welfare.