ce on men for labour, inputs and income. The tradition of registering land in the name of male household heads which was introduced in the colonial period has had very negative effects on women's independence, particularly in matrilineal clans where women's traditional inheritance rights were stronger. Also, the prevalence of women-headed households in many West African countries including Ghana, due to male migration, polygamy, conflict and other reasons means lack of legal ownership can restrict women's access to credit and extension services despite the fact that they are farm managers.
Development agencies which have failed to understand the independent nature of male and female farming have often created extra work for women because of their projects, or doomed development initiatives to failure. Let me give you an example. A project to support irrigated rice farming in the Gambia did not succeed because the planners assumed men were the main rice growers and women would help on their land. In reality, women were the dominant rice farmers and had no obligation to work on their husbands' land. Having lost their best rice plots to men under the project, women were pushed out to marginal land where they continued producing rice and other crops for family consumption. The poorer land reduced yields, having an impact on family nutrition. At the same time, intra-household conflicts developed because men refused to pay for women's labour for weeding and transplanting rice on the new fields. Women, already overworked on their marginal lands, withheld their assistance, resulting in further reduced yields on project land.31
With examples like this it is easy to see how misguided agricultural policies combined with periodic drought and rapidly growing populations has reduced Africa from a position of food self-sufficiency in 1950 to the current situation where the region meets only 86 per cent of its food staples needs, a figure which is expected to continue to fall to only 71 per cent by 2008.32 Surely we can no longer afford to neglect women's economic contribution, but must support them with training, appropriate technology and credit for inputs on a level equal with men.
Among women in Ghana, trade is the next most common form of economic activity after agriculture. One of the primary reasons for the predominance of women in trade in West Africa is the flexibility of the market system which allows women to bring their children with them to work. Time flexibility and informal child-care assistance from other market women enable them to combine their productive and reproductive roles effectively. Children also play valuable roles as intermediaries and errand-runners for their mothers who are confined to market stalls.
Women's dual roles can limit the expansion of their businesses, however, and in many places a division of labour in trade has developed whereby women more commonly sell subsistence goods in the open market or from small retail shops, whereas men tend to deal with more valuable consumer goods and own larger shops.
Women in both urban and rural areas figure far more prominently in the informal sector than in formal wage employment. Often, women take on informal tasks such as house-cleaning on top of their own household responsibilities and formal jobs in order to supplement meagre wage earnings or to secure a modest income independent from their husband's. The informal economy covers a very wide range of activities from small-scale manufacturing, to self-employed tradespeople to people engaged in personal services and family enterprises. What enables this collection of activities to be called a sector is the fact that all of it takes place beyond the boundaries of social and labour legislation. In many countries, the size of the informal sector is estimated to be considerably larger than the formal sector, however statistics on informal economic activity are not well kept and are often speculative. In Brazil, nearly half of all women workers are self-employed, compared to roughly one fifth of male workers. In Bot