Polygyny and Farm Households' Resilience to Climate Shocks
Sylvain Dessy, Luca Tiberti, Marco Tiberti, David Zoundi
Abstract
Climate change and weather shocks pose \n major challenges for household income security and \n well-being, especially for smallholder farmers’ communities. \n In such communities, imperfect risk insurance and labor \n markets may induce households to use traditional \n institutions such as polygyny to harness their size and \n composition to their resilience strategies against these \n shocks. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing how \n polygyny’s interaction with droughts affects crop yields. \n For identification, the paper relies on the spatial \n variation in polygyny’s prevalence across Mali’s rural \n communes and the randomness of drought episodes. The \n findings show that polygynous communities are more resilient \n to drought-induced crop failure. Exploration of the \n mechanisms shows that polygynous communities diversify their \n income sources more than monogamous ones, including via \n child marriage—a phenomenon known to undermine women’s \n outcomes. As the literature links polygyny to \n underdevelopment, interventions to eliminate it should make \n formal resilience and adaptation strategies available to \n drought-prone communities. Failure to do so may entrench \n political opposition to enforcing a ban on polygyny and \n child marriage.