In most rural areas of Cameroon, women are incorporating a market-oriented
dimension to their farming activities. This is an improvement from years before
when food crop farming was almost exclusively for household consumption.
This additional focus on food crop farming is mainly as a result of the need to
supplement household incomes following the drop in salaries which came as a
result of the economic crisis Cameroon and many African countries have been
facing since the 1980s. Nominal incomes for salary earners in Cameroon, mostly
men, were slashed by over 60 per cent in the early 1990s (Tchoungui et al., 1995).
The agricultural sector was not spared either. Most of Cameroon’s foreign earnings
come from agricultural commodities – cocoa, coffee, cotton, whose production
is largely in small-holdings owned mostly by men. In the 1980s, world prices
for these commodities collapsed, and of course, the incomes of the small-holders
dropped drastically. The burden of making up for this shortfall within households
was placed on the backs of women. Considering that decision-making
seems to be based on, among other factors, economic power, income earnings is
likely to confer a certain degree of decision-making power on women (Ngome
2003). This paper looks at how change in the gender division of labour impacts
women’s decision-making power, and whether the traditional division of labour,
which gives women very little access to labour-augmenting resources, leads to
an inefficient allocation of resources that retard development.