Including women in commercial agriculture benefits the whole household: Evidence from Uganda

By Kate Ambler, Kelly Jones, and Michael O’SullivanJanuary 30, 2026

Reprinted with permission from VoxDev.

Formally including Ugandan women in commercial agriculture—through contract ownership or behavior-change interventions—can increase women’s empowerment without reducing productivity, and with positive spillovers for household welfare and gender relations.

Estimates suggest that there are 475 million smallholder farms in low- and middle-income countries, including 43 million in sub-Saharan Africa (Lowder et al. 2016, FAO 2017). For these farmers, engaging in commercial value chains can have positive impacts on economic outcomes such as income, employment, and farm productivity, as well as on other outcomes like consumption and nutrition (Ogutu et al. 2020, Saha et al. 2021). However, pivoting from subsistence towards commercial production involves risks in terms of fallback food security; it may also shift control of production and resources within a household.

Researchers have documented that an individual’s empowerment, defined as the ability to make decisions about one’s life and act upon them, is strongly linked to access to resources (Kabeer 1999, Ashraf et al. 2010, Doss 2013, Ambler 2016). In many smallholder households, women grow kitchen gardens and often larger plots to ensure subsistence. This gives women some measure of control over an important household resource. When land is shifted to commercial production, resource control may also change, skewing the balance of power towards men, who often already have a resource advantage. As such, though agricultural commercialization may raise incomes, it may not have even impacts across men and women absent specific policy interventions (DeWalt 1993, Hill and Vigneri 2009¹).

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