The Peanut Innovation Lab’s gender specialist, Jessica Marter-Kenyon, presented lab-funded research from Malawi this week at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting, which was held online due the Covid-19 travel and gathering restrictions.
Marter-Kenyon’s paper, “Gender and the Transition from Tobacco to Groundnut in Malawi,” reviewed the results of qualitative fieldwork she conducted in Malawi through USAID’s AgDiv program exploring the different ways rural women and men are impacted by the shift in crops.
Jacqueline Banks, a postdoc at the University of Minnesota, also presented on research funded through the Peanut Innovation Lab. Her paper, “Understanding Intra- and Inter- Household Gendered Power Dynamics in the Division and Time Allocation of Work and Resources: An Ethnographic Assessment of a Peanut-Farming Population in Rural Senegal,” draws on a study conducted earlier this year by Banks and Marter-Kenyon, along with two Senegalese PhD students (Codou Ndiaye and Maimouna Diop).
This research is part of a larger study, Gender, fertility, and intra-household dynamics and resilience in the Senegalese peanut production chain, funded through the Peanut Innovation Lab and led by Stuart Sweeney at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-PIs from the Centre de Recherche pour le Développement Economique et Social in Senegal.