Thoughts on the Rural Environment

"The world’s population is going to stop at nine billion and go down. It’s an enormous achievement. And it’s largely an achievement of women, and particularly poor women who have been able to get hold of contraceptives or say, 'No'. Literacy is the best predictor of this. As soon as you see tiny improvements in female literacy, women gain more control of their own lives and you see dramatic falls in fertility." - Danny Dorling,  2010

Women in rural areas, in most countries, often face more barriers in getting an education, in getting access to contraception and thus controlling the size of their families. I'm simplifying here, but the basic human geography mode suggests that without education, the labour value of people is their main asset, and so the more children you have the more labour your family work force can do. So there may be little impetus to overcome these barriers.

But what sort of labour are these families doing? In Kenya, where I did my fieldwork, and in Ghana, where I taught English a few years ago, the vast majority of families were reliant on agriculture for their subsistence. So much so that in Ghana we wold be covering lessons for Ghanaian teachers because they had gone to tend their farms that day. In Kenya, labour has a strong gender divide: men are in charge of the animals (though women sometimes took charge of chickens and goats) and women do the majority of the agricultural labour. In terms of how these contribute to feeding the family, it's fair to say the majority of the food came from the women's efforts. And it is those who depend on agriculture for daily living that are hit hardest by a changing environment. The whole East Africa region has suffered with drought, and when the rains do come the soil is degraded and large gulleys form, dividing up the village.

These environmental issues have some similarities and some difference to those faced by rural populations in the UK...