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Author: Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
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.
Author: Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Malapit, Hazel J.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 68
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Book Description
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.
Author: Doss, Cheryl
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
Interest in the meaning and measurement of women’s empowerment has become a stated goal of many programs in international development. This paper explores a collaborative process of studying women’s empowerment in agricultural research for development using both quantitative and qualitative methods. It draws on three bodies of research around empowerment, growing interest in qualitative methods, and measurement research, especially the conceptualization and adaptations of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Employing mixed methods over more than a decade of cooperation among researchers from the Global South and the Global North has challenged the methods and findings of each approach. The work has led to new insights about gender differences in what empowerment means to women and to men, the importance of context, interrelationships among dimensions of empowerment, and the need for greater precision in terms and measures, particularly around decision-making, asset ownership, and time use. Such collaborative research benefits from a long timeframe to build trust and shared understandings across disciplines. The paper concludes with suggestions for the next phase of research.
Author: Eissler, Sarah
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
The SELEVER study is a five-year impact evaluation designed to address key knowledge gaps on the impact of a poultry value chain intervention on the diets, health, and nutritional status of women and children in Burkina Faso. This report qualitatively examines the SELEVER program’s impact on women’s empowerment and intra-household gender dynamics in relation to food production and allocation, as well as control and use over poultry resources in the study areas. Six villages across five provinces were purposively selected for this study. Data were collected using multiple qualitative methods. In each village, we conducted four sex-disaggregated focus group discussions, and semi-structured individual interviews were held with a man and a woman from two different households. Sex-disaggregated seasonal calendars were created for half of the villages. Interviews were also conducted with project service providers in each community, including group leaders (n=13), voluntary vaccinators (n=10), and poultry traders (n=6). A mix of inductive and deductive thematic coding guided the analysis of the data. Men and women participants described an empowered woman in terms of her confidence, how she spent her time, financial capacity, and freedom of movement. SELEVER beneficiaries illuminated how gender norms were shifting related to household activities and women’s empowerment, such that young boys are now washing dishes and women earn additional incomes from raising her own poultry. Yet results suggest that women’s empowerment may threaten men and their masculinity, an important tension of which SELEVER and other projects should be cognizant. Participants perceived that while SELEVER has increased women’s access to the necessary resources and capacity to raise quality poultry, and their incomes, women still lack full latitude to make decisions around when to sell or kill their bird. Instead they must rely on their husbands’ permission. Beneficiaries are more aware of the benefits of consuming poultry products, yet barriers persist for actual consumption. This report further details the intersectional nature of these findings, which will be important to consider. The differences in women’s role in monogamous versus polygynous households is especially important to consider in interpreting the program impacts and further strengthening the program delivery activities. The SELEVER program has improved outcomes for women across the village sites in terms of empowerment, awareness raising, and behavior change. Yet barriers and challenges, often rooted in social norms, persist for women’s involvement in poultry production, their empowerment, and the potential for the SELEVER program to improve diets of household members.
Author: Ragasa, Catherine
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 71
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Book Description
Inclusive agricultural value chains (VCs) are potential drivers for poverty reduction, food security, and women’s empowerment. This report assesses the implementation of the Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education Training for Women Program (ATVET4Women) that aims to support women with vocational training and market linkages in priority agricultural value chains. This report focuses on Malawi, one of the six pilot countries of the ATVET4Women; and focuses on vegetable value chains in which some non-formal training sessions have been conducted as of October 2019. This report presents (1) program experience of stakeholders; (2) evidence of program benefits and challenges among ATVET4Women non-formal training graduates; and (3) baseline data on value chain and empowerment indicators, using a pilot household survey-based instrument for measuring women’s empowerment in agricultural value chains (pro-WEAI for market inclusion) and supplementary qualitative research. Results show graduates’ satisfaction and appreciation of the training provided, and some graduates reported having access to more lucrative markets as a result of the training. However, positive changes in several outcome indicators were reported by only some graduates: 30 percent of graduates reported increased production and sales. There is no significant difference in the reported changes and levels of vegetable production and income between graduates and non-graduates. Qualitative findings suggest that constraints to accessing agricultural inputs and funds to upgrade their production may be why there are no measured differences. Results on empowerment status reveal that 73 percent of women and 85 percent of men in the sample are empowered, and 73 percent of the sample households achieved gender parity. The main contributor of disempowerment among women and men is lack of work balance and autonomy in income. Fewer women achieved adequacy in work balance than men. Adequacies in attitudes about domestic violence, respect among household members, input in productive decisions, and asset ownership are generally high for both women and men, but significantly lower for women. While this report is mainly descriptive and further analysis is ongoing, it offers some lessons and practical implications for improving ATVET4Women program implementation and its outcomes on women’s market access, incomes, and empowerment.
Author: Myers, Emily
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 49
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Book Description
We conduct a synthetic review of the literature examining relationships between domains of women’s empowerment and food system outcomes. Many studies report significant positive associations between women’s empowerment and intrahousehold gender equality with child dietary and nutrition outcomes, household food security, and agricultural production, but which aspect of empowerment matters for a particular outcome varies across contexts. Others document significant but mixed associations between empowerment indicators and women’s dietary diversity scores. The findings suggest women’s empowerment contributes to improved diets and nutritional status, especially for children, but that household wealth, gender norms and country-specific institutions remain important. Most papers reviewed were based on observational studies and therefore estimated associations; future research using experimental and quasi-experimental methods would add significantly to the evidence base.
Author: Ragasa, Catherine
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
This paper develops a new framework to measure and track women’s empowerment in governance of countries’ agrifood systems. All too often, women’s needs, priorities, and voices are missing from the policy process, even when women may be disproportionately affected by shocks or have distinct policy preferences. The Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Systems Governance (WEAGov) is an assessment framework to help countries and stakeholders measure the extent of inclusion and leadership of women in agrifood systems governance and to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. WEAGov looks across three stages of the policy cycle: policy design, policy implementation, and policy evaluation. At each stage of the policy cycle, WEAGov asks three questions central to women’s empowerment in governance: Are women considered? Are women included? And are women influencing? This paper describes the process of conceptualizing and developing the WEAGov assessment framework by drawing together evidence, experience, and lessons from the literature and from over 30 stakeholder consultations across several countries and sectors to develop a practical and theoretically grounded framework.
Author: Seymour, Greg
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
Monitoring progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5—achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls—remains challenging unless we incorporate women’s empowerment metrics into nationally representative and multi-topic surveys. To address this data gap, we designed the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) as a streamlined empowerment module suitable for the 50x2030 Initiative, a global partnership that aims to build capacity and close the agricultural data gap in 50 countries by 2030, as well as other large multi-topic surveys. WEMNS measures women’s and men’s empowerment and is applicable to urban and rural areas and a variety of livelihood strategies (farming, self-employment, wage labor) across countries in different stages of structural transformation. WEMNS is a counting-based, multidimensional index composed of four domains: intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, collective agency, and agency-enabling resources. Each domain is measured with binary indicators derived from question sets in the WEMNS module. In this paper, we describe the development and testing of WEMNS and its components, including: (1) WEMNS's distinctiveness from other empowerment metrics; (2) the iterative approach used to develop and pilot the WEMNS module in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi, and Nepal, using cognitive interviewing, phone surveys, and face-to-face surveys; (3) analysis of quantitative pilot data; and (4) a summary of the findings from the cognitive interviewing. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned and possibilities for further development of WEMNS and other empowerment metrics.
Author: Quisumbing, Agnes R.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 84
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Book Description
Agricultural development projects increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but efforts to evaluate their impact have been stymied by the lack of comparable measures. Moreover, the context-specificity of empowerment implies that a quantitative measure alone will be inadequate to capture the nuances of the empowerment process. The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a portfolio of 13 agricultural development projects in nine countries in South Asia and Africa, developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and qualitative protocols for impact evaluations. Pro-WEAI covers three major types of agencies: instrumental, intrinsic, and collective. This paper synthesizes the results of 11 mixed-methods evaluations to assess these projects’ empowerment impacts. The projects implemented the pro-WEAI and its associated qualitative protocols in their impact evaluations. Our synthesis finds mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate indicators of women’s empowerment, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. There were more significant impacts on instrumental agency indicators and collective agency indicators, reflecting the group-based approaches used. We found few significant impacts on intrinsic agency indicators, except for those projects that intentionally addressed gender norms. Quantitative analysis does not show an association between the types of strategies that projects implemented and their impacts, except for capacity building strategies. This finding reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis, given the small number of projects involved. The qualitative studies provide more nuance and insight: some base level of empowerment and forms of agency may be necessary for women to participate in project activities, to benefit or further increase their empowerment. Our results highlight the need for projects to focus specifically on empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of both a common metric to compare empowerment impacts across projects and contexts and qualitative work to understand and contextualize these impacts.
Author: Lecoutere, Els
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 61
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Book Description
In many developing countries, agricultural extension services are generally biased towards men, with information targeted mainly to male members of a farming household and in formats that are rarely tailored to female members. Nevertheless, female farmers may also benefit from such services as this may affect their ability to make informed decisions, resulting in increased farm productivity, household income, and welfare. We conduct a gendered field experiment among maize-farming households in eastern Uganda to test whether video-enabled extension messaging affects outcomes related to maize cultivation. In this experiment, men, women, and couples are shown randomly assigned videos about improved maize management practices in which male, female, or both male and female actors are featured. We first vary exposure to the videos by gender to test the effects of changes in intra-household information asymmetries, investigating whether involving women as recipients of information increases their ability to participate in household decision-making, and thus their involvement in household production choices. We then vary exposure to the gender of the actors in the videos to test for role-model effects, exploring whether involving women as information messengers challenges the idea that decision-making is a predominantly male domain, in turn affecting women’s outcomes. Results show that targeting women with information increases their knowledge about improved maize management practices, their role in agricultural decision-making, the adoption of recommended practices and inputs, production-related outcomes, and the quantity of maize women sell to the market. Results for the role-model effects are mixed, and are evident more in joint household outcomes than individual women’s outcomes. Overall, our findings suggest that in the context of our study, extension efforts aimed at directly addressing intra-household information asymmetries may be a first-best means of empowering women in agriculture. Other, more subtle means that seek to influence perceptions and norms about gendered roles in the household may not generate expected effects or work via expected impact pathways, though they remain worth further exploration.
