Scenario+4



A woman that is a 40-year-old widow living in Ethiopia trying to make ends meat. She has four kids between the ages of 15-20 years old and her husband passed away a several years ago. She has no formal education and didn't work when her husband was alive. She is having a difficult time after her husbands’ death and has taken on many new responsibilities. After her husband's death she wanted to return to her parents’ house with her children. But some benevolent neighbors and distant relatives offered to help her and convinced her to stay in her husband’s village. She stayed in the village with her several children and owns only two chickens and no cattle. She collects water for drinking and cooking from her neighbor’s tube well.

She worked as a maid in the village and received food and rice on the days that she worked but no cash. She decided that she would learn to farm if she could get some land to sharecrop. A local benefactor, Mr. X, gave her some land for sharecropping and helped her plant crops. The sharecropped land that she is farming is situated at a roadside and does not have the best soil. She explained that renting fertile land is too expensive for her and she has to work from morning to evening on infertile land where she gets lower yields. She cannot afford to plow her land with a power tiller so she and her kids tills the land by hand with a spade. Her children and her do all the work by themselves from planting to harvesting of the paddy and it takes hours on hours to complete the job. 