Is Women S Empowerment Bearing Fruit Mapping Women S Empowerment In Agriculture Index Weai Results Using The Gender And Food Systems Framework

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.

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 year marks 20 years of implementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which was broadened under the 2014 Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods. The 2023 Annual Trends and Outlook Report generates evidence on the implementation of the CAADP/Malabo agenda and thus contributes to the design of the post-Malabo phase of CAADP implementation. The report assesses the current state of Africa's food systems, explores strategic issues related to food systems transformation, and reflects on necessary methodologies and approaches to provide a better understanding of key challenges and necessary actions to accelerate transformation.

We discuss the evolution of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) from its initial launch in 2018 until early 2023. We explain the reasons motivating changes to the composition of pro-WEAI and the adequacy thresholds of several indicators and discuss the implications of both for the overall measurement of project impacts on women’s empowerment. We present supporting empirical results comparing projects’ impacts calculated using the abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) (the predecessor to pro-WEAI with fewer indicators and less stringent indicator cut-offs), the pilot 12-indicator version of pro-WEAI, and the final, revised 10-indicator version of pro-WEAI, based on longitudinal data from six agricultural development projects in East and West Africa and South Asia as part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). In addition, we assess the sensitivity of the revised pro-WEAI to an alternative weighting scheme, namely inverse covariance weighting (ICW). Overall, we find that the revised pro-WEAI performs well: In comparison to A-WEAI, pro-WEAI—regardless of version—identifies larger and more frequently significant impact estimates, indicating that pro-WEAI is more sensitive to detecting project impacts on women’s empowerment than A-WEAI. And we find only minor differences in impact estimates produced using the 12-indicator, 10-indicator, or alternate weighting scheme versions of pro-WEAI. We conclude with reflections on six years of work on pro-WEAI during GAAP2.

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.

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.

Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment in food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition, and in more just, resilient, and sustainable food systems for all. This paper uses a scoping review to assess the current evidence on pathways between gender equality, women’s empowerment, and food systems. The paper uses an adaptation of the food systems framework to organize the evidence and identify where evidence is strong, and where gaps remain. Results show strong evidence on women’s differing access to resources, shaped and reinforced by contextual social gender norms, and on links between women’s empowerment and maternal education and important outcomes, such as nutrition and dietary diversity. However, evidence is limited on issues such as gender considerations in food systems for women in urban areas and in aquaculture value chains, best practices and effective pathways for engaging men in the process of women’s empowerment in food systems, and for addressing issues related to migration, crises, and indigenous food systems. And while there are gender informed evaluation studies that examine the effectiveness of gender- and nutrition- sensitive agricultural programs, evidence to indicate the long-term sustainability of such impacts remains limited. The paper recommends keys areas for investment: improving women’s leadership and decision-making in food systems, promoting equal and positive gender norms, improving access to resources, and building cross-contextual research evidence on gender and food systems.