Implications of women’s work space and work load on small-stock production by beneficiaries of Livestock Management and Infrastructure Development (LIMID) programme in the central district of Botswana

In Botswana, poverty alleviation programmes that are agricultural oriented, have been developed for rural dwellers. Despite these interventions, there is still persistent poverty in the rural areas. Some of the research works have shown that some influential factors are overlooked when developing and implementing these programmes especially for women empowerment. The most commonly considered social factor is the compatibility of the programme to the needs of beneficiaries while leaving a vast of social factors. Based on this, and investigation was carried out to get views on nature of chores, work space, time-use, workload and their implication on small-stock production from women beneficiaries of a poverty alleviation programme. A mixed research method was used to collect data from a sample of women beneficiaries who benefitted from the programme over five years since 2014. The quantitative data was collected from 370 randomly selected beneficiaries and four focus group discussions were used to collect qualitative data. The results revealed that, women’s nature of chores determines their work space. Additionally, women’s workload and time use compromise some economic daily activities. In this manner, women’s nature of chores, workspace, workload and time use have negative implications on small-stock production by women. This calls for policy makers, as initiators of programmes development and extension sector as implementers to always consider this social factor since it has shown its influence in agricultural production by women. Key words: Botswana, primary activity, secondary activity, workload, workspace