The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI)
The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI)

Author: Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2017-07-02

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13:

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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.

A multi-country validation and sensitivity analysis of the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI)
A multi-country validation and sensitivity analysis of the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI)

Author: Seymour, Greg

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13:

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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.

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

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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
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:

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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.

Measuring progress toward empowerment
Measuring progress toward empowerment

Author: Malapit, Hazel J.

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published:

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13:

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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 Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index
The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index

Author: Sabina Alkire

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was initially developed as a tool to reflect women's empowerment that may result from the United States government's Feed the Future Initiative, which commissioned the development of the WEAI. The WEAI can also be used more generally to assess the state of empowerment and gender parity in agriculture, to identify key areas in which empowerment needs to be strengthened, and to track progress over time. The WEAI is an aggregate index, reported at the country or regional level, based on individual-level data collected by interviewing men and women within the same households. The WEAI comprises two subindexes. The first assesses the degree to which women are empowered in five domains of empowerment (5DE) in agriculture. It reflects the percentage of women who are empowered and, among those who are not, the percentage of domains in which women enjoy adequate achievements. These domains are (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) control of use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time allocation. The second subindex (the Gender Parity Index [GPI]) measures gender parity. The GPI reflects the percentage of women who are empowered or whose achievements are at least as high as the men in their households. For those households that have not achieved gender parity, the GPI shows the empowerment gap that needs to be closed for women to reach the same level of empowerment as men. This technical paper documents the development of the WEAI and presents pilot data from Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Uganda, so that researchers and practitioners seeking to use the index in their own work would understand how the survey questionnaires were developed and piloted, how the qualitative case studies were undertaken, how the index was constructed, how various indicators were validated, and how it can be used in other settings.

Is women’s empowerment bearing fruit? Mapping women’s empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI) results using the gender and food systems framework
Is women’s empowerment bearing fruit? Mapping women’s empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI) results using the gender and food systems framework

Author: Myers, Emily

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2023-06-02

Total Pages: 49

ISBN-13:

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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.

Two Essays on the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture
Two Essays on the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture

Author: Sandra Maritza Contreras

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Several authors argue that one mechanism to promote economic growth in agriculture is a sector that is more inclusive and equitable towards women. Thus, there is increasing interest in the measurement and drivers of women's condition and efforts directed at improving their agency, status and power. One measurement strategy center on the novel concept of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). This dissertation is composed of two essays to empirically evaluate women's empowerment and focuses on the WEAI. The first paper of this dissertation centers on the evaluation of the Women's Empowerment in Agricultural Index and the Abbreviated Women's Empowerment in Agricultural Index (A-WEAI). These tools have been used extensively to measure and track women's empowerment in agriculture and is based on the multidimensional empowerment concept that relies on different indicators to measure the latent concept of women's empowerment. After a quantitative assessment of the indices using the Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes approach (MIMIC), we conclude that holding all other variables constant, the probability of increasing the correlation between the variable women's empowerment and the indicators of the indices is higher under the WEAI than under A-WEAI. Ownership of assets and workload indicators require attention, but due to uniqueness that workload indicator brings to the women's empowerment discussion, the way this indicator is used in the calculation of the indices needs refinement. The paper concludes by proposing a theoretical revision of the links between women's empowerment and time allocation. Motivated by the finding of the first paper, the second paper proposes a new theoretical framework that is based on Becker's model of allocation of time, but incorporates Sen's and Kabeer's definitions of empowerment, with respect to time allocation. Under this framework, women's empowerment is part of a utility maximization problem, and new relationships and explanations offered to understand some of the apparent contradictory results found in empirical studies. These studies found empowerment contributes to decreasing the allocation of time to leisure. The objective of the paper is not only to propose a different theoretical approach, but to test it empirically using the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey and modeling time allocation using Two-Stage Least Squares to control for endogeneity of empowerment status. We conclude, after accounting for the endogeneity in the models, that the Sen model generates more consistent estimates of the relationship between time allocation and empowerment. We suggest data collection strategies to understand the actual freedom of individuals when making time allocation decisions in order to refine assessment of the model. These refinements, combined with our modeling, will assist in rigorous assessment of interventions designed to improve women's welfare.

Project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture: results from cognitive testing in Myanmar
Project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture: results from cognitive testing in Myanmar

Author: Lambrecht, Isabel

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2020-07-02

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13:

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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.