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With research staff from more than 70 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

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David Spielman

David Spielman is the director of IFPRI’s Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit and has been with the institute since 2004. His research agenda covers a range of topics including agriculture and rural development policy; agricultural science, technology, and innovation; plant genetic resources and seed systems; agricultural extension and advisory services; and community-driven rural development.

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Projects

The Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) is an assessment tool developed by IFPRI and partners to help evaluate the extent to which women are empowered across the policy cycle related to agrifood systems. WEAGov provides a way for national policymakers, civil society organizations, and researchers to identify gaps and opportunities to raise women’s voice and agency at different stages of the national policy cycle and provides a basis for monitoring progress in women’s empowerment in agrifood systems governance and related indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Project duration: 2022 – 2024

Contact

Catherine Ragasa

Jordan Kyle

Funders

CGIAR Trust Fund

Partners

African Agricultural Technology Foundation

Implementation Manual

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Interactive Infographics

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Training Videos

Video 1: WEAGov conceptual framework (17 min)
Goal: Viewer should understand why WEAGov exists, what the 3×3 framework is, and how to apply it analytically to food policy. Watch Video

Video 2: Implementing WEAGov tool (24 min)
Goal: Viewer understands the full 6 step methodology of implementing a full WEAGov assessment, data sources and scoring approach, and how to interpret results. Watch Video

Video 3: Using WEAGov tools for your own research (18 min)
Goal: Viewer who is not running a full WEAGov assessment can identify which WEAGov components are modular and applicable to their own project, and leave with concrete, actionable tools. Watch Video

Publications

Resource thumbnail

Working Paper

Are food policies empowering women? Framework, measurement, and empirical evidence from India and Nigeria

2025Kyle, Jordan; Ragasa, Catherine
Details

Are food policies empowering women? Framework, measurement, and empirical evidence from India and Nigeria

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize equal participation and empowerment of women in all levels of decisionmaking, yet frameworks and tools to measure and strengthen women’s empowerment in policy spaces remain limited. Focusing on agrifood systems, this paper introduces a framework, metrics, and scoring method to track women’s empowerment in policy processes (WEAGov) and presents findings from pilot applications in India and Nigeria. The pilots draw on novel surveys with more than 200 agrifood organizations and policy experts across the public sector, private sector, civil society, and research communities in both countries. Across both countries, we find that agrifood policy documents incorporate gender priorities on paper but fall short in budgeting, implementation, and evaluation. Prevailing social attitudes and limited awareness of policies, regulations, and legal rights remain major constraints on women’s ability to engage meaningfully in policy processes. Women participate as staff and mid-level managers in agrifood organizations, but their representation at higher decision-making levels are limited. Expert assessments also highlight disconnects between formal roles and the actual influence women can exert over policy decisions. Gender-responsive budgeting processes are absent in Nigeria and weakly-institutionalized in India, where compliance has become procedural rather than transformative. These patterns reveal persistent bottlenecks in translating gender commitments into practice. By systematically tracking barriers and identifying entry points for reform, the WEAGov framework offers governments, researchers, and civil society organizations a practical tool to diagnose gaps in women’s empowerment in agrifood policy processes and to strengthen their inclusiveness and accountability.

Year published

2025

Authors

Kyle, Jordan; Ragasa, Catherine

Citation

Kyle, Jordan; and Ragasa, Catherine. 2025. Are food policies empowering women? Framework, measurement, and empirical evidence from India and Nigeria. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2395. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/179834

Country/Region

India; Nigeria

Keywords

Africa; Asia; Sub-saharan Africa; Southern Asia; Western Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Gender; Women; Governance; Food Policies

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

Resource thumbnail

Brief

Advancing women’s voice and empowerment in the agrifood policy process: Findings and recommendations from the WEAGov India Pilot Study

2025Ragasa, Catherine; Kyle, Jordan; Yasmin, Sabina; Pande, Harshita; Basu, Sampurna; Sharma, Aanshi; Najjar, Dina
Details

Advancing women’s voice and empowerment in the agrifood policy process: Findings and recommendations from the WEAGov India Pilot Study

Women’s equal participation and leadership in political and public life can boost a country’s long-run economic growth, foster social inclusion, and help countries reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond these important outcomes, women’s inclusion in public life is a basic human right: women deserve a role in making decisions, controlling resources, and shaping policies. Yet, globally, only 22 percent of members of parliament and 16 percent of cabinet secretaries are women. Although disproportionately employed in the agrifood system, women lack decision-making power regarding the policies that govern it. And beyond high-level statistics like the share of women in national parliaments, there is a lack of tools for measuring and tracking gender equality in national- and state-level governance (ElDidi et al., 2021; Quisumbing et al., 2023; Ragasa et al., 2022). Yet, achieving meaningful progress on gender equality within governance requires identifying specific gaps and opportunities within a country’s policy process.

Year published

2025

Authors

Ragasa, Catherine; Kyle, Jordan; Yasmin, Sabina; Pande, Harshita; Basu, Sampurna; Sharma, Aanshi; Najjar, Dina

Citation

Ragasa, Catherine; Kyle, Jordan; Yasmin, Sabina; Pande, Harshita; Basu, Sampurna; Sharma, Aanshi; and Najjar, Dina. 2025. Advancing women’s voice and empowerment in the agrifood policy process: Findings and recommendations from the WEAGov India Pilot Study. WEAGov Brief 2025. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/173280

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agrifood Systems; Capacity Development; Decision Making; Women’s Empowerment

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Brief

Resource thumbnail

Working Paper

Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) assessment framework insights from the India pilot study

2024Ragasa, Catherine; Kyle, Jordan; Yasmin, Sabina; Pande, Harshita; Sharma, Aanshi; Basu, Sampurna; Najjar, Dina
Details

Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) assessment framework insights from the India pilot study

Women’s equal participation and leadership in political and public life can boost a country’s long-term economic growth, foster social inclusion, and help countries reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Beyond these important outcomes, women’s inclusion in public life is a basic human right: Women deserve a role in making decisions, controlling resources, and shaping policies. Despite the importance of women’s voices and their empowerment in policy and decision-making processes, available metrics show that women’s policy and political empowerment remains low. Moreover, these metrics are inadequate in systematically tracking women’s voices and empowerment across different levels of decision-making. IFPRI developed an assessment framework—Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov)—to assess women’s voices and empowerment in national policy processes in agrifood systems. This paper presents results from the pilot testing of WEAGov in India from January to March 2024. In this paper, we present how the WEAGov tool works in the Indian context, analyze trends in the data that we collected during the pilot, and provide an overview of the status of women’s voices and empowerment in the agrifood policy process as of March 2024. The pilot testing in India provides useful lessons on improving the measurement of these outcomes and offers valuable policy insights on critical entry points for increasing women’s voices and empowerment in the national agrifood policy process, design, implementation, and evaluation.

Year published

2024

Authors

Ragasa, Catherine; Kyle, Jordan; Yasmin, Sabina; Pande, Harshita; Sharma, Aanshi; Basu, Sampurna; Najjar, Dina

Citation

Ragasa, Catherine; Kyle, Jordan; Yasmin, Sabina; Pande, Harshita; Sharma, Aanshi; et al. 2024. Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) assessment framework insights from the India pilot study. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2313. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/168968

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Women’s Empowerment; Gender; Agrifood Systems; Governance; Policies; Measurement

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Working Paper

Blogs

Pathways to power in fragile settings: Rethinking women’s roles in agriculture and food systems
Event Post
 | 
April 25, 2025

Pathways to power in fragile settings: Rethinking women’s roles in agriculture and food systems

By Agnes Quisumbing, Jordan Kyle, Katrina Kosec, and Catherine Ragasa

Difficult circumstances also offer opportunities.

Workshop: Applying the Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) tool to support gender-responsive policy innovation across Africa
Event Post
 | 
July 12, 2024

Workshop: Applying the Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) tool to support gender-responsive policy innovation across Africa

By Jordan Kyle, Catherine Ragasa, Susan Kaaria, Margaret Mangheni, Dorine Odongo, and Anne Omamo

Collaborating to make food systems more inclusive.

Six big ideas to advance food systems resilience in Nigeria: Bringing CGIAR Initiatives together to foster collaboration and policy coherence
Event Post
 | 
September 13, 2023

Six big ideas to advance food systems resilience in Nigeria: Bringing CGIAR Initiatives together to foster collaboration and policy coherence

By Katrina Kosec, Jordan Kyle, Evgeniya Anisimova, Lucia Carrillo, and Omobolanle Onilogbo

Stakeholders grapple with rapid change.

View all Blogs

News

October 24, 2024 | In the News

At high level dialogue, Stakeholders Rally Support for Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture (National Update/Punch)

This article published by National Update (Nigeria) wrote about a recent high-level dialogue on the CGIAR HER+ initiative in Abuja held on October 9, 2024, that aimed to address barriers women face in Nigeria’s agrifood sector.

Funders

CGIAR Trust Fund

Team members

Jordan Kyle

Jordan Kyle

Research Fellow, Poverty,
Gender, and Inclusion

Jordan Kyle

Jordan Kyle

Research Fellow, Poverty,
Gender, and Inclusion

Other

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External Resources

External blogs

On December 6, 2023, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) organized a workshop on Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) Assessment Tool under the CGIAR initiative on Gender Equality with the assistance of the Agricultural Policy Research Network (APRNet). The workshop gathered esteemed experts, policymakers, and stakeholders to deliberate on crucial strategies for enhancing gender inclusivity within Nigeria’s agrifood systems.

External events

On May 12 in Abuja, Nigeria, two CGIAR initiatives – Fragility, Conflict, and Migration (FCM) and National Policies and Strategies (NPS) – brought together policymakers, researchers, and representatives from the private sector and civil society to discuss how to advance food systems resilience amid crises while empowering women and youth, in the context of Nigeria. The workshop featured presentations from six other CGIAR research initiatives working in Nigeria and fostered lively discussions. Participants delved into cutting-edge research outcomes, identifying evidence gaps and potential collaborative avenues.

 

Various

News articles