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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Ruth Meinzen-Dick

Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a Senior Research Fellow in the Natural Resources and Resilience Unit. She has extensive transdisciplinary research experience in using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Her work focuses on two broad (and sometimes interrelated) areas: how institutions affect how people manage natural resources, and the role of gender in development processes. 

Where we work

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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experts

Nutrition, Diets, and Health

Gayathri Ramani

Senior Research Analyst

Bio

Gayathri Ramani is a Research Analyst in the Nutrition, Health, and Diets Unit. Since joining IFPRI, she has worked on several research projects across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. She specializes in quantitative research and has worked on issues related to agriculture, social protection, women’s empowerment, mental health, nutrition, livelihoods, and resilience. She earned a master’s degree at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, specializing in Development Economics, and a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College, double majoring in Economics and Mathematics.

Publications

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Journal Article

Enhancing agency and empowerment in agricultural development projects: A synthesis of mixed methods impact evaluations from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2)

2024
Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Malapit, Hazel J.; Seymour, Greg; Heckert, Jessica; Doss, Cheryl; Johnson, Nancy L.; Rubin, Deborah; Thai, Giang; Ramani, Gayathri V.
…more Myers, Emily; GAAP2 for pro-WEAI Study Team
Details

Enhancing agency and empowerment in agricultural development projects: A synthesis of mixed methods impact evaluations from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2)

Development interventions increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but evaluating their impact has been stymied by the lack of measures that are comparable across interventions. This paper synthesizes the findings of 11 mixed-methods impact evaluations of agricultural development projects from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that were part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). As part of GAAP2, qualitative and quantitative data were used to develop and validate the multidimensional project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), which was used to assess the impact of GAAP2 projects on women’s empowerment. This paper assesses the extent to which: (1) a two- to three-year agricultural development project can contribute to women’s empowerment; and (2) a suite of methods comprising a standardized quantitative measure of women’s empowerment and a set of qualitative protocols, can evaluate such impacts. Our synthesis finds that the most common positive significant impacts were on the instrumental and collective agency indicators that comprise pro-WEAI, owing to the group-based approaches used. We found few projects significantly improved intrinsic agency, even among those with explicitly stated objectives to change gender norms. Unsurprisingly, we find mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate pro-WEAI, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. Our results highlight the need for projects to design their strategies specifically for empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of a suite of methods containing a common metric to compare empowerment impacts and qualitative protocols to understand and contextualize these impacts.

Year published

2024

Authors

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

Citation

Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Seymour, Greg; Heckert, Jessica; Myers, Emily; GAAP2 for pro-WEAI Study Team; et al. 2024. Enhancing agency and empowerment in agricultural development projects: A synthesis of mixed methods impact evaluations from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). Journal of Rural Studies 108(May 2024): 103295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2024.103295

Keywords

Southern Asia; Sub-saharan Africa; Agricultural Development; Gender Equality; Women’s Empowerment; Data

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2024.103295 Source record

Project

Agriculture for Nutrition and Health

Record type

Journal Article

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Brief

What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

2024Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani
Details

What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)-related challenges around the world can negatively affect communities and individuals, but people in resource-constrained areas face additional obstacles in preventing and recovering from the consequences of inadequate WASH infrastructure. WASH interventions in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) often target women as key actors for achieving project outcomes and many aim to improve the quality of women’s lives; fewer, however, have a specific focus on empowering women. A systematic review concluded that studies within the WASH sector have rarely focused specifically on empowering women, despite efforts to reach and benefit them (Caruso et al. 2022). In a review of gender-sensitive WASH indicators that have been used in the peer-reviewed literature, gray literature, and toolkits from organizations operating in WASH, only around 10% of the 162 indicators identified specifically measured empowerment. Given the limitations of previous approaches to measuring WASH-related empowerment, we recently developed a Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH), a suite of indicators to measure women’s and men’s agency in the WASH sector, based on data collected in Malawi and Nepal. This project note first provides some context for the Malawi study, then describes our overall approach to developing the WE-WASH indicators and summarizes the implementation of the WE-WASH question naire, and then presents some key findings emerging from Malawi.

Year published

2024

Authors

Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani

Citation

Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; and Raghunathan, Kalyani. 2024. What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH). IFPRI Project Note January 2024. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://hdl.handle.net/10568/138288

Country/Region

Malawi

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Southern Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Water; Hygiene; Infrastructure; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

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Working Paper

Development of a Women’s Empowerment metric for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WE-WASH)

2023
Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Myers, Emily; Ramani, Gayathri V.; Faas, Simone; Ferguson, Nathaniel; Seymour, Greg; Malapit, Hazel J.; Paz, Florencia; Chiwasa, Febbie
…more Chilalika, Joan; Kamwaba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Chirwa, Gowokani Chijere; Simkoko, Abigail; Chilungo, Abdallah; Upadhyaya, Rachana; Pradhan, Meeta S.; Joshi, Nira; Shrestha, Sanish
Details

Development of a Women’s Empowerment metric for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WE-WASH)

There is a growing focus on gender-sensitive approaches and women’s empowerment in the water, sanitation, and hygiene sectors. At the same time, there is a lack of metrics to measure women’s empowerment in the WASH sector. Such metrics are important for understanding the types of programmatic interventions that are most needed for addressing women’s empowerment, as well as for assessing their impacts on women’s empowerment. In this report, we describe the development of a Women’s Empowerment metrics for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WE-WASH). We collected data from individual women and men in 812 households in Malawi and 826 households in Nepal. Using the data, we develop 14 indicators and establish cutoff thresholds (i.e., whether the individual is empowered) in the areas of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency in WASH; instrumental and intrinsic agency in menstrual hygiene management; and the empowerment environment (or resources for empowerment). In each country, we observe differences in empowerment levels between women and men, that favor men on most outcomes. Notably, in both countries, we find that women are much less likely than men to contribute to WASH infrastructure decisions, and most women are spending an undue amount of time contributing to WASH-related labor. In Nepal especially, agency related to menstrual hygiene management is also a substantial area of disempowerment for women.

Year published

2023

Authors

Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Myers, Emily; Ramani, Gayathri V.; Faas, Simone; Ferguson, Nathaniel; Seymour, Greg; Malapit, Hazel J.; Paz, Florencia; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwaba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Chirwa, Gowokani Chijere; Simkoko, Abigail; Chilungo, Abdallah; Upadhyaya, Rachana; Pradhan, Meeta S.; Joshi, Nira; Shrestha, Sanish

Citation

Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Myers, Emily; Ramani, Gayathri V.; Faas, Simone; Ferguson, Nathaniel; et al. 2023. Development of a Women’s Empowerment metric for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WE-WASH). IFPRI Discussion Paper 2207. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.137008

Country/Region

Malawi; Nepal

Keywords

Southern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Africa; Southern Asia; Asia; Eastern Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Gender; Water; Capacity Development; Hygiene; Infrastructure; Men; Women

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.137008 Source record

Record type

Working Paper