A Comparison of Agricultural Labour Productivity of Maize, Beans and Matooke in Uganda

Abstract

Improving productivity is a major concern for any profit-oriented organization as it represents the effective and efficient conversion of resources into marketable products and determining business profitability The labour costs are an important part of any business. Different authors have revealed that labour costs represent around 33% to 50% of the overall costs of a given project. Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods and services expressed by some measure. Productivity in economics measures the output per unit of input such as labour, capital or any other resource. Labour productivity is thus the number of units produced per employee in a manufacturing business. Using a 2003 cross section collected from 123 communities in 8 of Uganda’s 111 districts, Peterman et al., 2011b estimates the size of the raw gender gap (the difference in mean value of crop production per acre between female and male farmers) for these areas to be 50%. This productivity gap remains statistically significant even after controlling for farmer and plot characteristics, inputs applied, and household fixed effects. The 2010 DSIP highlights the potential, in this context, for gender targeted interventions to achieve large productivity increases. This work is going to put emphasis on acquiring the labour productivity of the hired labour, family labour men, women urban and rural farm workers participating in the Uganda’s agricultural labour force, and it seeks to provide us with the necessary ways of boosting this productivity, in line with the implementation of the PDM.