Dataset Information

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

ABSTRACT: With growing commitment to women's empowerment by agricultural development agencies, sound methods and indicators to measure women's empowerment are needed to learn which types of projects or project-implementation strategies do and do not work to empower women. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has been widely used, requires adaptation to meet the need for monitoring projects and assessing their impacts. 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/disempowerment; 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.

SUBMITTER: Malapit H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6694750 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

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

Malapit Hazel H Quisumbing Agnes A Meinzen-Dick Ruth R Seymour Greg G Martinez Elena M EM Heckert Jessica J Rubin Deborah D Vaz Ana A Yount Kathryn M KM

World development 20191001

With growing commitment to women's empowerment by agricultural development agencies, sound methods and indicators to measure women's empowerment are needed to learn which types of projects or project-implementation strategies do and do not work to empower women. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has been widely used, requires adaptation to meet the need for monitoring projects and assessing their impacts. In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation ...[more]

PMID: 31582871

Similar Datasets

Project description:Women's empowerment is a process that includes increases in intrinsic agency (power within); instrumental agency (power to); and collective agency (power with). We used baseline data from two studies-Targeting and Realigning Agriculture for Improved Nutrition (TRAIN) in Bangladesh and Building Resilience in Burkina Faso (BRB)-to assess the measurement properties of survey questions operationalizing selected dimensions of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency in the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI). We applied unidimensional item-response models to question (item) sets to assess their measurement properties, and when possible, their cross-context measurement equivalence-a requirement of measures designed for cross-group comparisons. For intrinsic agency in the right to bodily integrity, measured with five attitudinal questions about intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, model assumptions of unidimensionality and local independence were met. Four items showed good model fit and measurement equivalence across TRAIN and BRB. For item sets designed to capture autonomy in income, intrinsic agency in livelihoods activities, and instrumental agency in: livelihoods activities, the sale or use of outputs, the use of income, and borrowing from financial services, model assumptions were not met, model fit was poor, and items generally were weakly related to the latent (unobserved) agency construct. For intrinsic and instrumental agency in livelihoods activities and for instrumental agency in the sale or use of outputs and in the use of income, items sets had similar precision along the latent-agency continuum, suggesting that similar item sets could be dropped without a loss of precision. IRT models for collective agency were not estimable because of low reported presence and membership in community groups. This analysis demonstrates the use of IRT methods to assess the measurement properties of item sets in pro-WEAI, and empowerment scales generally. Findings suggest that a shorter version of pro-WEAI can be developed that will improve its measurement properties. We recommend revisions to the pro-WEAI questionnaire and call for new measures of women's collective agency.

Project description: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 delivered 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 inconclusive evidence around impacts on intimate partner violence. 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.

Project description:BackgroundEvery year more than 200 million children under-five years fail to achieve their full developmental potential in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Although women´s empowerment has been associated with improved child health and development outcomes, this is a topic little studied in LMICs. We investigated the associations between women´s empowerment and early childhood development among a sample population of 84537 children aged 36-59 months from national health surveys of 26 African countries.MethodsWe used data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) ranging from 2010 to 2018. Four developmental domains were assessed among children using the Early Childhood Development Index: literacy-numeracy, physical, learning and socioemotional. Women's empowerment in attitude to violence, social independence and decision-making was evaluated using the SWPER global, a validated survey-based index. We reported effect sizes for each country and a combined estimate of the association. The study covers all countries with surveys in the region and uses a novel approach for measuring women's empowerment, the SWPER.ResultsAcross all countries, 15.1% of the children were on track in the literacy-numeracy domain, 92.3% in physical, 81.3% in learning and 67.8% in socio-emotional. The odds of a child being on track in literacy-numeracy increased by 34% (odds ratio (OR) = 1.34; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.31-1.37), 88% (OR = 1.88; 95% CI = 1.85-1.91) and 34% (OR = 1.34; 95% CI = 1.29-1.39), with a one standard deviation increase in the scores of attitudes to violence, social independence and decision-making domains of empowerment, respectively. No effect of empowerment was observed for the other domains of child development.ConclusionsOur results show a consistent positive effect of empowerment on the literacy-numeracy domain of child development cross-nationally in Africa and this was particularly evident for the social independence domain of the SWPER. Programs and interventions may also consider addressing the reduction of gender inequalities to improve child development.

Dataset Information

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

Publications

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

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets