-PDF Download- How Do Agricultural Development Projects Aim To Empower Women Insights From An Analysis Of Project Strategies EBOOK

How do agricultural development projects aim to empower women? Insights from an analysis of project strategies

Author: Johnson, Nancy L.

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13:

Increasing numbers of development agencies and individual projects espouse objectives of women’s empowerment, yet there has been little systematic work on mechanisms by which interventions can enhance women’s empowerment. This gap exists because of the lack of consensus on indicators as well as the lack of attention paid to measuring the effects of different types of interventions on empowerment. This paper identifies the types of strategies employed by 13 agricultural development projects within the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project Phase 2 (GAAP2) that have explicit objectives of empowering women. We distinguish between reach, benefit, and empowerment as objectives of agricultural development projects. Simply including women does not necessarily benefit them, and even activities that benefit do not necessarily empower. To identify strategies to empower women, we build on the domains included in the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and are working with the GAAP2 portfolio of projects to develop an empowerment metric that is applicable in the project setting (a project-level WEAI, or pro-WEAI). We have identified the following potential domains to be included in pro-WEAI: input into production decision making, control over resources, control over income, leadership, time, physical mobility, intrahousehold relationships, individual empowerment, reduction in gender-based violence, and decision making on nutrition. The GAAP2 projects address these domains through a wide variety of activities that can be grouped into four main types: (1) direct and indirect provision of goods and services; (2) forming or strengthening groups, organizations, or platforms and networks that involve women; (3) strengthening knowledge and capacity through agricultural extension, business and finance training, nutrition behavior change communication, and other training; and (4) changing gender norms through one-way awareness raising or two-way community conversations about gender issues and their implications. In general, projects with activities in more activity areas target more domains of empowerment, and most projects target a core set of six empowerment domains. With the exception of intrahousehold relationships, which is always targeted by activities designed to influence gender norms, projects target domains with different types of activities or combinations of activities. This setup suggests that there may be no one-to-one link between a specific activity and empowerment benefits, and that implementation modalities will determine whether and how an activity contributes to women’s empowerment. The effectiveness of these project strategies will be assessed using both quantitative and qualitative methods throughout the GAAP2 research project.

Can agricultural development projects empower women? A synthesis of mixed methods evaluations using pro-WEAI in the gender, agriculture, and assets project (phase 2) portfolio

Author: Quisumbing, Agnes R.

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2022-10-14

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

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

Author: Malapit, Hazel J.

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2019-01-18

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Women’s empowerment in agriculture: Lessons from qualitative research

Author: Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2019-01-18

Total Pages: 64

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Designing for empowerment impact in agricultural development projects: Experimental evidence from the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) project in Banglades

Author: Quisumbing, Agnes R.

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2020-08-12

Total Pages: 47

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The importance of women’s roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women’s empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by the Government of Bangladesh. The project’s treatment arms included agricultural training, nutrition behavior change communication (BCC), and gender sensitization trainings to husbands and wives together – with these components combined additively, such that the impact of gender sensitization could be distinguished from that of agriculture and nutrition trainings. Empowerment was measured using the internationally-validated project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), and attitudes regarding gender roles were elicited from both men and women, to explore potentially gender-transformative impacts. Our study finds that ANGeL increased both women’s and men’s empowerment, raised the prevalence of households achieving gender parity, and led to small improvements in the gender attitudes of both women and men. We find significant increases in women’s empowerment scores and empowerment status from all treatment arms but with no significant differences across these. We find no evidence of unintended impacts on workloads and we note inconclusive evidence of possible increases in intimate partner violence (IPV). Our results also suggest some potential benefits of bundling nutrition and gender components with an agricultural development intervention; however, many of these benefits seem to be driven by bundling nutrition with agriculture. While we cannot assess the extent to which including men and women within the same treatment arms contributed to our results, it is plausible that the positive impacts of all treatment arms on women’s empowerment outcomes may have arisen from implementation modalities that provided information to both husbands and wives when they were together. The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.

Evaluation of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 gender and empowerment frameworks and tools

Author: Johnson, Nancy

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2021-06-30

Total Pages: 18

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Two key outputs of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) are the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and the Reach, Benefit, Empower (RBE) framework. An e-survey was used to get a sense of awareness and use of the pro-WEAI and the RBE framework among a target population of potential users (A4NH program stakeholders). More than 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with funders, implementers, and evaluators, mainly but not exclusively associated with GAAP2, to understand how tools were used at different stages of the program/project cycle, from influencing program objectives and outcomes to program/project design to impact evaluation. The evaluation found that even though the pro-WEAI and the RBE framework are relatively new and their use is not yet widespread, their use in projects is growing and they have contributed to changes in project priorities and in how projects seeking to empower women are designed and evaluated.

Development of the Project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI)

Author: Hazel J. Malapit

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Women’s empowerment, agricultural extension, and digitalization: Disentangling information and role model effects in rural Uganda

Author: Lecoutere, Els

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published:

Total Pages: 61

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Uncovering more than a decade of WEAI use in USAID projects

Author: Moore, Lindsey

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 8

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Since its launch in 2012, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) has been widely used in USAID projects to prioritize and target activities that aim to promote women’s empowerment. It has been implemented in at least 37 countries by more than 200 partners and 60 different USAID operating units, offering valuable insights into the gender dynamics of agricultural production and identifying opportunities to enhance gender equality and women’s empowerment. By providing a more nuanced understanding of the challenges that women encounter in the agricultural sector, WEAI has played a crucial role in enhancing the ability of USAID programming to improve the lives of women and their families. This report presents key findings gathered from all reported WEAI use cases in the Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC), the largest resource for USAID-funded technical and project materials. A use case refers to a unique, real-world ex ample in which WEAI has been applied or utilized. A use case can demonstrate how WEAI has been used in a specific context or project, providing insight into its effectiveness, limitations, and potential for future applications. Together, these findings highlight the importance of WEAI as a tool for promoting gender equality and empowering women in the agricultural sector, while also providing useful insights that can inform future policies and programs.

Financial services for women

Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9251333254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The purpose of this study was to analyse the position of women in the maize and bean value chains in Rwanda, as well as the current and potential role of financial service providers (FSPs) in strengthening the positioning of women in these chains. The study used the women’s economic empowerment framework for the conceptual analysis, while similarly looking at overall financial inclusion indicators. This was all done within the context of a value chain analysis. The value chain concept provided a framework for analysis and explained the different functions in the value chains for bean and for maize, including the roles of men and women. The analysis showed how the available financial services not only reached women but also benefited and empowered them. A desk study, which accompanied the fieldwork and value chain analysis, showed that the enabling environment in Rwanda is very conducive to the promotion of women in agriculture. Government policies support the economic inclusion of women, and clear implementation strategies have been defined. However, women still experience challenges and constraints in terms of access to land and farm inputs, equipment, training, finance and market channels. Strong time constraints also exist due to double burden, as well as limited power in negotiations on decisions between members of their households (known as ‘intra-household bargaining power’). In this case the decisions are on use of resources and income. Furthermore, women still have less access to larger loans for inputs, trading and aggregation.