Empowerment Adaptation And Agricultural Production

Located at the heart of West Africa, Niger is a landlocked country with three-quarters of its territory covered by the Sahara Desert. Niger’s climate is mostly arid, and it is one of the least developed countries in the world. The vast majority of its population lives in rural areas, and the country is strongly dependent on agriculture. Agriculture is predominantly rainfed and yields rely on one rainy season. Although productivity in Niger has shown a positive trend, agriculture has been strongly affected in recent decades by several crises partly or entirely due to extreme weather events. Farmers pursue a number of strategies in the face of climatic (and nonclimatic) stressors including soil and water conservation methods such as barriers, terracing, and planting pits, and their adaptive capacity is deemed critical for estimating the economic impact of climate change. An understanding of climate change adaptation processes at the farm household level is therefore crucial to the development of well-designed and targeted mitigation policies. In this study, we use new data from Niger and regression analysis to study climate change adaptation through the digging of zaї pits and food production and the role of human capital measures therein. We find that adaptation is influenced by the perception that the frequency of droughts has increased and by the availability of financial resources and household labor. Adaptation is also influenced by educational attainment—both formal and Koranic school education. Adaptation of zaї pits is found to play an important role in food productivity. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that even though all households would benefit from adaptation, the effect is found to be significantly larger for households that actually did adapt relative to those that did not, indicating that the prospects of closing the productivity gap through encouraging adaptation in less well-endowed households are limited.

Niger is a landlocked Sahelian country, two-thirds of which is in the Sahara desert, with only one-eighth of the land considered arable. Nevertheless, more than 90 percent of Niger’s labor force is employed in agriculture, which is predominantly subsistence oriented. Since the great famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the country has pursued agrarian intensification through technological change to address challenges to the food security situation. However, this approach has failed to recognize that the main characteristic of the Sahelian part of West Africa is the intricate complexity of the social, environmental, and economic dimensions that differentially affect male and female rural dwellers. One example is the patrilineal tenure system, which under increased population pressure has led to the exclusion of women and youth from agriculture in some areas. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) indicates that access to land is one important dimension of empowerment. In order to assess the role of empowerment in agricultural production, we use new household- and individual-level WEAI data from Niger and regression analysis. Our results show that empowerment is important for agricultural production and that households in which adult individuals are more empowered are more productive. This means that other and possibly more effective pathways to agrarian intensification exist and important agricultural productivity gains could be made by empowering men and women in rural households.

The existing literature shows that climate change will likely affect several of the dimensions that determine people’s food security status in Bangladesh, from crop production to the availability of food products and their accessibility. Crop diversification represents a farm-level response that reduces exposure to climate-related risks and it has also been shown to increase diet diversity and contribute to the reduction in micronutrient deficiencies. In fact, the Government of Bangladesh has several policies in place that encourage and support agricultural diversification. However, despite this support the level of crop diversification in the country remains low. Women empowerment has been linked to diversified diets and positively associated with better child nutrition outcomes. Furthermore, although traditionally their role in agriculture tends to be undervalued, women involvement has already been shown to affect agricultural production choices and enhance technical efficiency. This paper connects three different areas of inquiry - climate change, gender and nutrition – by exploring whether women’s empowerment in agricultural production leads to increased diversification in the use of farmland. Specifically, we use a series of econometric techniques to evaluate whether there is sufficient evidence to claim that a higher levels of empowerment lead to greater diversity in the allocation of farmland to agricultural crops. Our results reveal that indeed some aspects of women empowerment, but not all, lead to a more diversified use of farmland and to a transition for cereal production to other uses like vegetables and fruits. These findings provide some possible pathways for gender-sensitive interventions that promote crop diversity as a risk management tool and as a way to improve the availability of nutritious crops.

This guidance entitled Integrating Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in CSA Programs focuses on a set of agricultural practices to be implemented by small-scale food producers in developing countries. The purpose of this document is to provide agriculture development practitioners and policy makers globally, with guidance, tools and examples of successful integration of gender equality and women’s empowerment (GEWE) into climate smart agriculture (CSA) work, by demonstrating the necessity and benefits of incorporating a GEWE approach in CSA work; and presenting tested strategies for enhancing the engagement of women and particularly vulnerable groups in CSA work. With a view towards accelerating the impacts of country programs, FAO and CARE have partnered to develop this guidance to help policy makers and practitioners meet the ambitious goals of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda.

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.

This brief summarizes the recent assessment of the implementation of the Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education Training for Women Program (ATVET4Women) that aims to support women and their families with vocational training and market linkages in priority agricultural value chains (VCs). The ATVET4Women program has two main components: formal training and nonformal training. Formal training consists of a 2- or 3-year vocational and technical course at an agricultural training center (ATC) where students gain skills (and a diploma) for employment or entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector. Nonformal training provides farmers with 1 to 3 weeks of training on good production and business management practices.