Assessing Progress toward Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Development Projects

The recognition of the intrinsic value of women’s empowerment has led to the development of better measures for monitoring progress toward this goal. Building on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has been used by 249 organizations in 60 countries, the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) worked with 13 agricultural development projects to develop a project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI). With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, this index allows agricultural development projects to diagnose key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment.

The UN Joint Programme on Accelerating Progress Towards the Economic Empowerment of Rural Women (JP RWEE) also used WEAI-based metrics in its phase 1 evaluation. The results from the GAAP2 and JP RWEE evaluations provide important lessons for measuring women’s empowerment across project portfolios, with implications for the design and scaling up of agricultural development projects with women’s empowerment objectives. The event will provide a platform for implementers and partners to discuss approaches that have worked to empower women across these projects and identify implications for future programming and scaling up.

IFPRI Participants

• Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform Framework - Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI
• GAAP2 overview - Hazel Malapit, Senior Research Coordinator, IFPRI
• Results and lessons from GAAP2 and JP RWEE - Agnes Quisumbing, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI