Page 47 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

Mbu Daniel Tambi, Mah-Soh Glennice Fosah: Econometric Modelling of Women
Empowerment and Agricultural Production in Cameroon

The results are but contrary and reason may be because most women in Cameroon are
engaged in agriculture and allied activities and therefore do not fully take advantage
of the training. This conforms to the study Agarwal (1997) who revealed that women
who are engaged in agriculture and other activities as well, significantly reduces the
probability of these women being empowered.

Furthermore, the findings disclose that women’s access to credit will increase their
empowerment while access to agricultural financing rather leads to a decrease in
women empowerment by 11%. However both findings are statistically insignificant.
Nonetheless, its insignificance could be attributed to the fact that very few women
belong to formal credit associations through which access to formal financing is
possible. As such, most women still depend on the long tradition of mutual aid among
themselves and the emergence of informal financing credit arrangements such as
rotating savings association. The above findings reveal that cluster mean cost of
consultation, being married, non-poor, involved in agriculture as primary activity, the
cost of seeds, receiving formal agricultural training, larger household and being
resident in the urban region negatively and significantly affect women empowerment
in Cameroon while use of fertilizer has a positive and significant effect on women
empowerment in Cameroon. On the other hand, access to credit, use of modern
agricultural equipment, and age or experience in main activity has a positive but
statistically insignificant effect on women empowerment in Cameroon. The possible
economic justification for the insignificance of the above is that studies focusing on
women’s empowerment itself as the outcome of interest are more likely to rely on
primary data sources as opposed to those where empowerment is an intermediary
factor in affecting other outcomes.

Estimate of Women Empowerment and Agricultural Production
Table 4 presents the results of OLS estimates, 2SLS estimates and the Control
Function estimates without interaction (CFa) and with interaction (CFb). Columns 1
reveals OLS estimates of agricultural production with endogenous inputs which result
in biased estimates, hence, the OLS result is not appropriate for inference. The 2SLS
therefore solves the problem of endogeneity and presents consistent IV estimates of
agricultural production. Columns 3 (A and B), presents the Control Function
estimates, which solves the problem of endogeneity bias, simultaneity bias and
heterogeneity bias congruently. The control function estimates seek to exogenize
women empowerment by introducing residuals and interaction of residual with the
endogenous regressor.

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