There is now considerable evidence that women’s empowerment is essential not only for women themselves but also for improving agricultural productivity and translating that productivity into nutritional gains and long-term poverty reduction for their households and society. Still, despite growing commitment by agricultural development agencies and project implementers to women’s empowerment, there is still no clear understanding of how to incorporate women’s empowerment into indicators for assessing agricultural development projects. Without such indicators, there is no way to know which types of projects or project implementation strategies work to empower women.
The second phase of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP2) will adapt and validate a measure of women’s empowerment that agricultural development projects can use to diagnose key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment. GAAP2 will also design appropriate strategies to address deficiencies and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. GAAP2 will lead to the development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, or the pro-WEAI.
Led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), GAAP2 is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (A4NH). GAAP2 builds upon the findings from the first round of the program (2009-2013), which fed into the development of the asset, social capital, and time use components of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). To read more about the findings from the first phase, including the tools developed by the program, click here.
A portfolio of agricultural development projects from South Asia and Africa, south of the Sahara, that focus on nutrition and/or income was selected through a competitive call for proposals. The GAAP2 team will work with these individual projects to use qualitative and quantitative data to understand how interventions can differentially affect men and women, develop a project-appropriate way of measuring women’s empowerment in agriculture, and build capacity to use this tool. Click here to find out more about the projects in the GAAP2 portfolio.
The main results of GAAP2 will be:
- Development of methods and tools for a project-level WEAI
- Evidence-based strategies for empowering women through agricultural development projects
- A cadre of development professionals — implementers, monitoring and evaluation specialists, donors, and researchers — who understand and use measures of women’s empowerment to design, implement, and assess programs