reduced by less and relative labor inputs have remained fairly constant between male- and female-headed households over the past decade.

However, our headline result of a large reduction in the agricultural productivity gender gap masks heterogeneity and lurking issues that will be key for policy makers in the coming years.<sup>5</sup> First, while our results focus on women’s productivity, their efficiency gains relative to men must be put in perspective with the relative land loss they experienced during the same period. Women have become more efficient, but they are given less to work with. The land loss suffered by female-headed households is also starting to impact food crop productivity, where the gender gap remains high: the lower number of fields managed by the household emerges as a big driver in 2016, perhaps due to higher exposure to risk. Strengthening women’s land rights, either through spousal co-titling, direct land transfer or safeguarding of inheritance rights, should be a key policy priority within agricultural programming in the country.

In addition to the remaining gender gap in food crop productivity, the RIF decomposition highlights that we still see large gender gaps among lower-productivity households in 2016. Since our productivity measure is closely related to income and asset-based poverty, as covered in Section 3, this means that targeting the poorest half of female-headed households, in particular as regards their food crop production, should be a key policy priority.

What does our analysis have to say about what the remaining drivers of the gender gap for these households are? In addition to the lower number of fields managed by the household, as discussed above, the other main driver is lower use of male household labor. Indeed, labor constraints, in particular lower use of _male_ labor, have emerged as a key cause of the gender gap across Sub-Saharan Africa (O’Sullivan 2014). This result has also been shown to hold for Côte d’Ivoire; agriculture programs in the country should consider implementing creative solutions such as labor vouchers and directly engaging husbands to reach the last mile in gender-egalitarian poverty reduction (Carranza et al. 2017).

Further, decision-makers in the agriculture sector should focus on better gender integration within export crop cultivation. Indeed, ‘occupational segregation’ across crop types can be considered the key driver of the productivity gap in Côte d’Ivoire: whether one accounts for export crop adoption by households or not determines whether female-headed households face a 21 percent productivity gap or no productivity gap (Tables 7 and 8). In the specific context of Côte d’Ivoire, our results suggest that by targeting export crop female producers, notably by increasing their use of inputs, agricultural policies have been successful at reducing gender inequality.

Moving more women into the export crop sector, which does not appear to have happened over the past decade, could be an avenue to further reduce gender inequality in the country and in the region. Implementing strategies that tailor extension services to female farmers’ needs, facilitate their access to markets and engage husbands as allies to encourage women to “cross-over” to high-value export crop cultivation should be at the top of the agenda in Côte d’Ivoire’s next National Development Plan.

Lastly, our analysis highlights the importance of collecting gender-specific data in household surveys and recording the gender of the main decision maker and/or owner for the important units of economic production in the household, such as agricultural plots and businesses. The 2008 data, where this information is available, show that productivity gaps are larger when conducting the analysis by gender of the plot owner or plot manager. However, our data in 2016 do not allow for an analysis of gender gaps except for by headship. This is a limitation, since most women do not live in female-headed households

> 5 The Africa Gender Innovation Lab is currently leading experiments on each of these key issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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