Development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI)

Development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI)
Author: Malapit, Hazel J.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2019-01-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.

Methods for measuring women's empowerment

Methods for measuring women's empowerment
Author: Doss, Cheryl
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 6
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Women’s empowerment is of paramount importance for multiple development goals. However, it is much easier to discuss the importance of empowerment than it is to define the methods and tools needed to measure it. This requires research focused on the conceptual understanding of how we should measure women’s empowerment, in a variety of facets, and the creation of tools and methods for doing so.

Measuring Women's Empowerment in Agriculture

Measuring Women's Empowerment in Agriculture
Author: Alessandra Garbero
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Agricultural development projects
ISBN: 9789290727910

"The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) can be a useful tool to measure the empowerment, agency and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector. However, computing the WEAI in its current form involves large data requirements, resulting in lengthy surveys with several questions on various dimensions and indicators within each dimension. This paper proposes a reduced version of the WEAI, or the R-WEAI, and examines two possible approaches to reduce the data requirements while ensuring comparability to the full WEAI."--

Women’s Empowerment and Nutrition

Women’s Empowerment and Nutrition
Author: Mara van den Bold
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Many development programs that aim to alleviate poverty and improve investments in human capital consider women’s empowerment a key pathway by which to achieve impact and often target women as their main beneficiaries. Despite this, women’s empowerment dimensions are often not rigorously measured and are at times merely assumed. This paper starts by reflecting on the concept and measurement of women’s empowerment and then reviews some of the structural interventions that aim to influence underlying gender norms in society and eradicate gender discrimination. It then proceeds to review the evidence of the impact of three types of interventions—cash transfer programs, agricultural interventions, and microfinance programs—on women’s empowerment, nutrition, or both. Qualitative evidence on conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs generally points to positive impacts on women’s empowerment, although quantitative research findings are more heterogenous. CCT programs produce mixed results on long-term nutritional status, and very limited evidence exists of their impacts on micronutrient status. The little evidence available on unconditional cash transters (UCT) indicates mixed impacts on women’s empowerment and positive impacts on nutrition; however, recent reviews comparing CCT and UCT programs have found little difference in terms of their effects on stunting and they have found that conditionality is less important than other factors, such as access to healthcare and child age and sex. Evidence of cash transfer program impacts depending on the gender of the transfer recipient or on the conditionality is also mixed, although CCTs with non-health conditionalities seem to have negative impacts on nutritional status. The impacts of programs based on the gender of the transfer recipient show mixed results, but almost no experimental evidence exists of testing gender-differentiated impacts of a single program. Agricultural interventions—specifically home gardening and dairy projects—show mixed impacts on women’s empowerment measures such as time, workload, and control over income; but they demonstrate very little impact on nutrition. Implementation modalities are shown to determine differential impacts in terms of empowerment and nutrition outcomes. With regard to the impact of microfinance on women’s empowerment, evidence is also mixed, although more recent reviews do not find any impact on women’s empowerment. The impact of microfinance on nutritional status is mixed, with no evidence of impact on micronutrient status. Across all three types of programs (cash transfer programs, agricultural interventions, and microfinance programs), very little evidence exists on pathways of impact, and evidence is often biased toward a particular region. The paper ends with a discussion of the findings and remaining evidence gaps and an outline of recommendations for research.

Measuring progress toward empowerment

Measuring progress toward empowerment
Author: Malapit, Hazel J.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 62
Release:
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) baseline survey results, summarizing both findings from the WEAI survey and the relationships between the WEAI and various outcomes of interest to the US Government’s Feed the Future initiative. These poverty, health, and nutrition outcomes include both factors that might affect empowerment and outcomes that might result from empowerment. The analysis includes thirteen countries from five regions and compares their baseline survey scores. WEAI scores range from a high of 0.98 in Cambodia to a low of 0.66 in Bangladesh.

Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture

Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture
Author: Carolyn E. Sachs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2020-10-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0429576358

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture covers major theoretical issues as well as critical empirical shifts in gender and agriculture. Gender relations in agriculture are shifting in most regions of the world with changes in the structure of agriculture, the organization of production, international restructuring of value chains, climate change, the global pandemic, and national and multinational policy changes. This book provides a cutting-edge assessment of the field of gender and agriculture, with contributions from both leading scholars and up-and-coming academics as well as policymakers and practitioners. The handbook is organized into four parts: part 1, institutions, markets, and policies; part 2, land, labor, and agrarian transformations; part 3, knowledge, methods, and access to information; and part 4, farming people and identities. The last chapter is an epilogue from many of the contributors focusing on gender, agriculture, and shifting food systems during the coronavirus pandemic. The chapters address both historical subjects as well as ground-breaking work on gender and agriculture, which will help to chart the future of the field. The handbook has an international focus with contributions examining issues at both the global and local levels with contributors from across the world. With contributions from leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners, and with a global outlook, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture is an essential reference volume for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in gender and agriculture. Chapter 13 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Women’s empowerment in agriculture: Lessons from qualitative research

Women’s empowerment in agriculture: Lessons from qualitative research
Author: Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 64
Release: 2019-01-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

There is growing recognition of the importance of women’s empowerment in its own right and for a range of development outcomes, but less understanding of what empowerment means to rural women and men. The challenge of measuring empowerment, particularly across cultures and contexts, is also garnering attention. This paper synthesizes qualitative research conducted conjointly with quantitative surveys, working with eight agricultural development projects in eight countries, to develop a project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI). The qualitative research sought to identify emic meanings of “empowerment,” validate the domains and indicators of the quantitative index, provide greater understanding of the context of each project and of strategies for facilitating empowerment, and test a methodology for integrating emic perspectives of empowerment with standardized etic measures that allow for comparability across contexts.

The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI)

The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI)
Author: Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 56
Release: 2017-07-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal—to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”—reflects a growing consensus that these are key objectives of development policy in their own right, while also contributing to improved productivity and increased efficiency, especially in agriculture and food production. To deliver on this commitment to women’s empowerment in development calls for appropriate measures that can be used to diagnose the scope and major sources of disempowerment and to measure progress. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a survey-based tool codeveloped by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (Alkire et al. 2013). The index was originally designed as a monitoring and evaluation tool for the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative to directly capture women’s empowerment and inclusion levels in the agricultural sector. Since its launch in February 2012, the WEAI has been implemented in the 19 Feed the Future focus countries. As with any new metric, pilot testing in a few selected countries with limited sample sizes is insufficient to demonstrate how the WEAI would perform when rolled out on a wider scale. Concerns expressed by users of the WEAI led to the creation of an abbreviated version—the A-WEAI. This paper begins by presenting a brief overview of the WEAI and its construction. It then proceeds to discuss (1) the background and motivation behind the creation of the A-WEAI; (2) the steps taken to develop the AWEAI— namely, cognitive testing and piloting of different modules, particularly those that were difficult to administer in the field; (3) analysis of the pilot data from Bangladesh and Uganda; (4) domain-specific comparisons of the different pilot versions; and (5) robustness checks and empowerment diagnostics from the A-WEAI as compared with the original WEAI. The paper concludes by summarizing the modifications to the original WEAI and discussing possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics based on the WEAI.