Gender and livestock feed research in developing countries: A review

Livestock productivity and the resulting economic benefits for smallholder farmers are constrained by a limited supply of quality feed. Gender influences both the drivers and constraints for feed technology adoption as well as the distribution of benefits from feed technologies; however, research with gender-disaggregated data related to livestock feed practices and technologies has not previously been systematically collected and analyzed. This review examines the current scope and patterns in the literature and highlights opportunities that could benefit future livestock feeding research. The review identified 72 articles with gender-disaggregated data related to livestock feeding, which were analyzed thematically based on the type of gender data collected: division of labor (44 articles), decision making (eight articles), knowledge (nine articles), and technology adoption (11 articles). Across nine different feed activities, women had a comparatively higher level of involvement than men in 49% of the observations (81), whereas men were more involved than women in 48% of the observations (79); equal involvement accounted for the remaining 3% of the observations (n = 7). However, individual feed tasks showed stronger involvement trends toward men or women. Women were more likely to be involved in the provision of feed to livestock than men (69% of observations, 24 observations), whereas men had higher levels of participation than women in fodder collection (54%, 19 observations) and grazing and herding (65%, 33 observations). Future research on women's roles in feed-related activities could help to improve adoption, scaling, and sustainability of feed improvement interventions through the use of gender-sensitive data collection tools.