Empowering Women In Agriculture The Role Of The Weai In Bangladesh

Author : Ahmed, Akhter,Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Malapit, Hazel J.,Ghostlaw, Julie
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 4 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2023-04-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Empowering women in agriculture: The role of the WEAI in Bangladesh by Ahmed, Akhter,Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Malapit, Hazel J.,Ghostlaw, Julie Pdf

Empowering women is crucial for a country's development because it leads to greater economic growth, increased productivity, and improved social outcomes. When women have access to education, economic opportunities, and decision-making power, they are better able to contribute to their families and communities. This can lead to increased income, improved health and education outcomes, and reduced poverty. In Bangladesh, women and girls still face considerable barriers to accessing education and economic opportunities, and are often subjected to traditional gender roles that may hinder them. Although women play a crucial role in agriculture, they experience many challenges that limit their productivity and economic potential, such as limited access to credit and training. They are also often marginalized and excluded from decision-making processes. As the complexity and importance of gender equity in development work has increased, so too has the need to measure empowerment and progress made toward improving empowerment and achieving gender parity. In Bangladesh, there has been growing momentum by the government and development partners to use evidence to inform gender-sensitive and -responsive policies and programs. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) has emerged as a key tool to achieve this objective. This brief examines how WEAI data have informed and supported the design of policies and programs to promote women's empowerment in Bangladesh.

Author : Akhter U. Ahmed
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1376210149

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Empowering Women in Agriculture: The Role of the WEAI in Bangladesh by Akhter U. Ahmed Pdf

Author : Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Kovarik, Chiara,Sproule, Kathryn,Pinkstaff, Crossley,Malapit, Hazel J.
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 56 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) by Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Kovarik, Chiara,Sproule, Kathryn,Pinkstaff, Crossley,Malapit, Hazel J. Pdf

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.

Author : Malapit, Hazel J.,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Seymour, Gregory,Martinez, Elena M.,Heckert, Jessica,Rubin, Deborah,Vaz, Ana,Yount, Kathryn M.
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-01-18
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) by Malapit, Hazel J.,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Seymour, Gregory,Martinez, Elena M.,Heckert, Jessica,Rubin, Deborah,Vaz, Ana,Yount, Kathryn M. Pdf

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 : Raghunathan, Kalyani,Ramani, Gayathri,Rubin, Deborah,Pereira, Audrey,Ahmed, Akhter,Malapit, Hazel J.,Quisumbing, Agnes R.
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 41 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Does market inclusion empower women? Evidence from Bangladesh by Raghunathan, Kalyani,Ramani, Gayathri,Rubin, Deborah,Pereira, Audrey,Ahmed, Akhter,Malapit, Hazel J.,Quisumbing, Agnes R. Pdf

Increased market inclusion through participation in agricultural value chains may increase employment and household incomes, but evidence on its empowerment impacts is mixed. In societies with restrictive social norms, greater market inclusion can enhance existing income and empowerment inequalities by relegating marginalized groups, including women, to low value chains or lower value nodes within those chains. We use primary data from rural Bangladesh to investigate the associations between households’ primary economic activity – agricultural wage-earning, production, or entrepreneurship – and absolute and relative levels of men’s and women’s empowerment. Women in producer households, on average, fare better on empowerment outcomes than women in wage-earner or entrepreneur households; the opposite is true for men. The gap between men’s and women’s empowerment scores is also lowest in producer households. A decomposition of these results into composite indicators yields insights into potential trade-offs, while accompanying qualitative work highlights the importance of social and cultural norms in shaping the economic roles women can adopt. With a push towards diversification of agriculture into higher value market-oriented crops, more careful programming is needed to ensure that market inclusion translates into an increase in women’s empowerment.

Author : Esha Sraboni,Hazel J. Malapit,Agnes R. Quisumbing,Akhter U. Ahmed
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 36 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture by Esha Sraboni,Hazel J. Malapit,Agnes R. Quisumbing,Akhter U. Ahmed Pdf

Women’s low status and persistent gender gaps in health and education in South Asia contribute to chronic child malnutrition (Smith et al. 2003) and food insecurity (von Grebmer et al. 2009), even as other determinants of food security, such as per capita incomes, have improved. This is particularly relevant for Bangladesh, where chronic food insecurity continues to be an important issue despite steady advances in food production. To be able to leverage agriculture as an engine of inclusive growth, there is a need to develop indicators for measuring women’s empowerment, examine its relationship to various food-security outcomes, and monitor the impact of interventions to empower women. Using nationally representative survey data from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture and two measures of household food security: per adult equivalent calorie availability and dietary diversity. We use the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index to assess the extent of women’s empowerment in agriculture and instrumental variables techniques to correct for the potential endogeneity of empowerment. We find that the overall women’s empowerment score, the number of groups in which women actively participate, women’s control of assets, and a narrowing gap in empowerment between men and women within households are positively associated with calorie availability and dietary diversity.

Author : Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Ahmed, Akhter,Hoddinott, John F.,Pereira, Audrey,Roy, Shalini
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 47 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2020-08-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Designing for empowerment impact in agricultural development projects: Experimental evidence from the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) project in Banglades by Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Ahmed, Akhter,Hoddinott, John F.,Pereira, Audrey,Roy, Shalini Pdf

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.

Author : Ahmed, Akhter U.,Malapit, Hazel J.,Pereira, Audrey,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Rubin, Deborah,Ghostlaw, Julie,Haque, Md. Latiful,Hossain, Nusrat Zaitun,Tauseef, Salauddin
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 81 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2018-10-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Tracking empowerment along the value chain: Testing a modified WEAI in the Feed the Future Zone of Influence in Bangladesh by Ahmed, Akhter U.,Malapit, Hazel J.,Pereira, Audrey,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Rubin, Deborah,Ghostlaw, Julie,Haque, Md. Latiful,Hossain, Nusrat Zaitun,Tauseef, Salauddin Pdf

Upon request of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted this study to support USAID in assessing the state of empowerment and gender parity of men and women along the agricultural value chain in the Feed the Future (FTF) Zone of Influence (ZOI) in Bangladesh. Specifically, IFPRI’s Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP), funded by USAID, piloted the modified Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) survey instruments in 10 upazilas (sub-districts) within the FTF ZOI across 1,200 households, which broadly belong to three economic activities of interest: (1) agricultural production, (2) agricultural entrepreneurship, and (3) agricultural sector employment. The quantitative survey was complemented by qualitative research to glean further insights into the facilitators and constraints of empowerment among various actors in the agricultural value chain. The data and analysis generated from this WEAI for Value Chain (WEAI4VC) study may inform USAID’s selection and design of interventions that may, in turn, maximize its programmatic impact on women and men’s empowerment as producers, entrepreneurs, and wage employees.

Author : Malapit, Hazel J.,Sproule, Kathryn,Kovarik, Chiara,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Ramzan, Farzana,Hogue, Emily,Alkire, Sabina
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 60 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2024-06-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Measuring progress toward empowerment: by Malapit, Hazel J.,Sproule, Kathryn,Kovarik, Chiara,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Ramzan, Farzana,Hogue, Emily,Alkire, Sabina Pdf

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.

Author : Seymour, Greg,Faas, Simone,Ferguson, Nathaniel,Heckert, Jessica,Malapit, Hazel J.,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,van Biljon, Chloe
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 48 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2023-11-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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A multi-country validation and sensitivity analysis of the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI) by Seymour, Greg,Faas, Simone,Ferguson, Nathaniel,Heckert, Jessica,Malapit, Hazel J.,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth,Quisumbing, Agnes R.,van Biljon, Chloe Pdf

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.

Author : De Pinto, Alessandro,Seymour, Gregory,Bryan, Elizabeth,Bhandary, Prapti
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 31 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Women’s empowerment and crop diversification in Bangladesh: A possible pathway to climate change adaptation and better nutrition by De Pinto, Alessandro,Seymour, Gregory,Bryan, Elizabeth,Bhandary, Prapti Pdf

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.

Author : Rubin, Deborah,Ferdousi, Shammi,Parvin, Aklima,Rahaman, S.M. Tahsin,Rahman, Shuchita,Rahman, Waziha,Redoy, Md.
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 40 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2018-10-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Qualitative research on women’s empowerment and participation in agricultural value chains in Bangladesh by Rubin, Deborah,Ferdousi, Shammi,Parvin, Aklima,Rahaman, S.M. Tahsin,Rahman, Shuchita,Rahman, Waziha,Redoy, Md. Pdf

In Bangladesh, IFPRI has received support from USAID through its Policy Research and Strategy Support Program in Bangladesh (PRSSP) to work in the geographic areas targeted by Feed the Future interventions (known as the Zone of Influence) to construct this new WEAI4VC module. The qualitative research study, conducted by IFPRI field officers, complements a 1,200 household quantitative survey, looking in greater depth at the individual, household, and community level experiences of men and women to understand the consequences of value chain participation on them as producers, entrepreneurs, and wage workers on women’s empowerment. The quantitative study sampled 400 households for each of the three economic activities of interest – (1) agricultural production, (2) agricultural entrepreneurship, and (3) agriculture sector employment. It was carried out in ten administrative units (upazilas or sub-districts), and five villages in each upazila to total 50 villages.

Author : Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Malapit, Hazel J.,Seymour, Greg,Heckert, Jessica,Doss, Cheryl,Johnson, Nancy,Rubin, Deborah,Thai, Giang,Ramani, Gayathri V.,Meyers, Emily,GAAP2 for pro-WEAI Study Team
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 84 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2022-10-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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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 by Quisumbing, Agnes R.,Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela,Malapit, Hazel J.,Seymour, Greg,Heckert, Jessica,Doss, Cheryl,Johnson, Nancy,Rubin, Deborah,Thai, Giang,Ramani, Gayathri V.,Meyers, Emily,GAAP2 for pro-WEAI Study Team Pdf

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 : Lambrecht, Isabel,Sproule, Katie,Synt, Nang Lun Kham,Ei Win, Hnin,Win, Khin Zin
Publisher : Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Page : 26 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2020-07-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture: results from cognitive testing in Myanmar by Lambrecht, Isabel,Sproule, Katie,Synt, Nang Lun Kham,Ei Win, Hnin,Win, Khin Zin Pdf

When designing and evaluating policies and projects for women’s empowerment, appropriate indicators are needed. This paper reports on the lessons learned from two rounds of pretesting and cognitive testing of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) in a total of five States/Regions in Myanmar. We assess if respondents understand the modules as intended and which questions require modification based on the cultural context. We find that the questions also present in the abbreviated WEAI are generally well understood, particularly on instrumental and group agency. The challenge to respond to hypothetical and abstract questions did become apparent in the domains representing intrinsic agency, and was problematic for questions on autonomy and self-efficacy. Also, the internationally validated questions on attitudes towards domestic violence were too abstract, and responses depend on the scenario envisioned. We also suggest including an adapted version of the module on speaking up in public, to reinforce the domain on collective agency. Our findings provide an encouraging message to those aspiring to use pro-WEAI, but emphasize the need for continued attention for context-specific adjustments and critical testing of even those instruments that are widely used and deemed validated.

Author : Shahnaj Parveen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Bangladesh
ISBN : CORNELL:31924097804896

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Empowerment of Rural Women in Bangladesh by Shahnaj Parveen Pdf

Based on the author's dissertation and field studies carried out in 2003 in three villages in Mymensingh district. Assesses the perceived status of rural women and gender division of labour at household level. Analyses the nature of rural women's empowerment and factors influencing it, and develops a strategic framework for promoting the status of rural women.