June Yee Tsun Po

McGill University
Ph.D. candidate

Supervisor: Gordon Hickey
Start: 2012-09-03
End: 2017-08-31
Personal page

Project

How do Women Smallholder Farmers' Access to Land Resources Relate to Food Security in Semi-arid Regions of Kenya
Expanding opportunities and empowering women and girls have been key to reducing child mortality and achieved greater socio-ecological progress in development programs in recent decades. Improving sustainable agriculture by targeting small-scale farmers, particularly women, this interdisciplinary research project explores how women smallholder farmers’ participation in agricultural decisions, access land resources within local institutional structures and relationships, and how greater contextual factors in the local communities and regional counties relate to children’s nutritional growth and household food security. Smallholder farmers are the major producers of food in most developing countries. The term ‘smallholder’ refers to their limited resource endowments such as land, agricultural inputs, and access to markets and institutions. These low endowments hinder their coping capacity when facing stress such as unfavourable rain seasons, population pressure, food price volatility. Women experience further constraints in their access to productive factors, including land, technology and credit in developing areas. Women have tenuous customarily entitlement to cultivate farms of their husbands or fathers. Yet previous literature has suggested that improved access to land resources by women enhances household food security in several rural regions. To our knowledge, there is a lacuna of empirical evidence relating women’s access to land resources to childhood nutritional growth as an important indicator of household food security in semi-arid agrarian societies. This study aims to understand how women, as cooks and care-providers in the family, are also key actors in improving food and nutritional security when they gain better access to land resources in the semi-arid midlands of Kenya.

Keywords

gender, socio-ecological systems, land resource management, rural sustainable livelihoods, resilience science

Publications

1- Respiratory disease associated with solid biomass fuel exposure in rural women and children: systematic review and meta-analysis
Po, J. Y. T., J. M. FitzGerald, C. Carlsten
2011 Thorax

2- Mortality Burden and Socioeconomic Status in India
June Y. T. Po, S. V. Subramanian
2011 PLoS ONE

3- An RNAi screen of the RRM-domain proteins of Trypanosoma brucei
Wurst, Martin, Ana Robles, June Po, Van-Duc Luu, Stefanie Brems, Mari Marentije, Savrina Stoitsova, Luis Quijada, Jörg Hoheisel, Mhairi Stewart, Claudia Hartmann, Christine Clayton
2009 Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology

4- Control of mRNA degradation in trypanosomes
Clayton, Christine, Angela Schwede, Mhairi Stewart, Ana Robles, Corinna Benz, June Po, Martin Wurst, Rafael Quieroz, Stuart Archer
2008 Biochemical Society Transactions