Rural Women and the Consequences of Drought : A case study of how severe droughts can affect female farmers living in Babati District in Northern Tanzania, and how this may reflect a global context

Abstract: This is a thesis regarding a local event that occurred in Babati district in North-Eastern Tanzania during the autumn of 2009. In the district the period between June-November is normally a dry period, but this year the serenity of the drought was considered as harsher than usual. The majority of the workforce in Tanzania and in Babati is within the agricultural sector, and thus are directly dependant on the weather for the cultivation of the crops. A severe drought that wipes out the larger amount of the yield is devastating for the farmer-households, both socially and economical. The drought in question may or may not have been a result of climate changes, but it can be used as a mirror to future and present events that actually happens due to a changed climate. The reactions and consequences that this drought had on the people who got affected can tell us something about how future changes of the climate, or even temporary fluctuations of the weather, may concern people globally. My field study confirms the gendered imbalance in resilience against ecological changes, by illuminating how the women-headed households were the group that had been hardest hit of the farmers that I interviewed. This can be connected to a pandemic structure where poor, rural women constitute the most vulnerable group when it comes to ecological catastrophes and changed patterns in weathers and/or climate. The social impacts that the drought had on the inhabitants of Babati in general, and it’s female inhabitants maintaining on agricultural in particular, works as a general example on how people that already constitute a marginalized group in society, are the least resilient when it comes to endure natural catastrophes.