Spousal Information Sharing, Food Safety, and Value Chains in Northern Ghana

Ensuring food safety is crucial for enhancing healthcare in low and middle-income countries. This dissertation proposes a direct approach to improving food safety through the implementation of a voluntary food grading system and incentivized contracts. Additionally, we examine the sharing of information within households to identify the appropriate target audience for information campaigns, especially those related to food safety. Our findings suggest that men are more likely to share information with their spouses if income is shared, while women share information equally regardless of income sharing. In cases where income is shared evenly between the couple, training leads to an increase in knowledge on the extensive margins but not the intensive margins. These results highlight the importance of income control in determining how information is shared within households, particularly how men acquire and share information with their wives.

We observed that training and enrollment in a voluntary food grading program prompted producers to shift their behavior, resulting in a decrease in the average aflatoxin levels and a sustained increase in production and sales. However, in the short run, consumers' behavior changed but reduced significantly over time. Lastly, we discovered that establishing contracts that incentivize the adoption of aflatoxin-reducing practices in the Ghanaian groundnut value chain was challenging and unsustainable, as aggregators and processors were unwilling to cooperate.