Home Gardens in Nepal

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garden management activities. It is an important tool for recording the gender-based division
of labour in the home garden area, which is used to gather the information of the gendered
pattern of activities and responsibilities within home garden.


Resource (Access/Control) Analysis
The resources profile is a tool for identifying the resources those women and men utilise to
carry out their activities. It mainly focuses on who has access to or control over resources
for production and utilisation.


Benefit Analysis
Benefit analysis focuses on who benefits from each of the enterprise. It refers specifically to
the one who has access to or control of the output of production. This includes all the end
uses of product.


During the time of focus group discussions, the group was facilitated in doing their own
gender analysis by using a checklist, by giving a pictorial set of man, woman, and child; and
maize grains to indicate the magnitude of their role and decision making. While putting
maize grains, the male and female were asked to put maize grains on the picture of man,
woman and child to indicate their proportionate contribution (role and decision making) to
different activities of home garden.


Data entry and analysis


After the data collection, the collected information were cleaned, coded and entered in to a
statistical package i.e. Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) and analysis using a
simple descriptive statistics.


FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS


Gender Role in Home garden


Gender division of labour is the division of labour whereby roles, responsibilities and
activities are assigned to women and men based on gender. It is an overall societal pattern
in which women are allocated another set, for e.g. weeding and ploughing are gender roles
of women and men respectively. In home garden management activities both male and
female play an important role. In some activities female were more involved whereas in
some activities male were more involved. Depending upon the nature of work the
involvement percentage differs. By considering these, this study tries to analyse the gender
role in different region and ethnicity and found the following findings (Table 1).


Vegetable Production
Most vegetable production and management activities are shared among the genders in the
family. From the study it was found that in rich and medium wealth categories male and
female equally shared the activities whereas female had more contribution than male in poor
wealth category in Gulmi site. But in case of Rupandehi female labour was more involved
than the male in all wealth categories of indigenous group and rich and poor categories of
migrant group and both male and female equally involved in medium wealth category. This
may be because the male of the poor category in Gulmi and indigenous group in Rupandehi
were involved in activities such as carpentry, wage labouring, construction and services in
India other than home garden. Among the different categories, children (26%) of poor
category in Gulmi site have more contribution in Vegetable production and management
activities. As Neupane et al. (1993) reported that male and female were almost equally
involved in vegetable production activities. This study also found that, in both sites male and
female were jointly involved in vegetable production and management activities within the

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