Adapting the Women's empowerment in agriculture index to specific country context: Insights and critiques from fieldwork in India.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gupta S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6853022 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Adapting the Women's empowerment in agriculture index to specific country context: Insights and critiques from fieldwork in India.
Gupta Soumya S Vemireddy Vidya V Singh Dhiraj D Pingali Prabhu P
Global food security 20191201
The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a direct, multi-dimensional measure of women's access to resources and decision-making in various domains of agriculture. However, several challenges characterize its use: adaptation of questionnaires to local agricultural contexts, modifications to index construction once underlying activities and adequacy thresholds are modified, and sensitivity analysis. In this paper, we address such challenges based on our experience of adapting and usi ...[more]
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.
| S-EPMC6876673 | biostudies-literature
Project description: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.
| S-EPMC6694750 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In 2015, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include fostering gender equality and women's empowerment and ending hunger and malnutrition. To monitor progress and evaluate programmes that aim to achieve these goals, survey instruments are needed that can accurately assess related indicators. The project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) is being developed to address the need for an instrument that is sensitive to changes in empowerment over the duration of an intervention. The pro-WEAI includes new modules with previously untested survey questions, including a health and nutrition module (focused on women's agency in this area) and an intrahousehold relationships module. This study uses cognitive interviewing to identify how new survey questions might be misinterpreted and to understand what experiences women are referencing when they respond to these questions. This was undertaken with the goal of informing revision to the modules. The study was conducted in Bangladesh with women from nuclear, extended, and migrant-sending households and from two regions of the country to identify difficulties with interpretation and response formulation across these groups. Findings revealed that questions were generally understood, but participants occasionally responded to the wrong part of the question, did not understand key phrases, or were uncomfortable with questions. The findings also suggested ways to revise the modules and strengthen the pro-WEAI. The revised pro-WEAI health and nutrition and intrahousehold relationships modules will advance the ability to measure changes in these domains and their relationship with the health and nutritional status of women and their children.
| S-EPMC7038906 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Improving female empowerment is an important human rights and development goal that needs better monitoring. A number of indices have been developed to track female empowerment at the national level, but these are incomplete and may obscure important sub-national variation. We developed the Female Empowerment Index (FEMI) to track multiple domains of women's empowerment at the sub-national level. The index is based on six categories of empowerment: violence against women, employment, education, reproductive healthcare, decision making, and access to contraceptives. The FEMI has a range of zero to one (low to high empowerment), and it is calculated as the mean proportion of positive outcomes in the six categories. To provide a proof of concept, we computed the FEMI for Nigeria and its 36 states from five Demographic and Health Surveys between the years of 1990 and 2013, using questions asked to 98,542 women between 15 and 49 years old. At the national level, the FEMI increased from 0.34 to 0.48. However, there was substantial sub-national variation, with state-level values ranging from 0.16-0.60 in 1990 to 0.19-0.73 in 2013. Our findings thus illustrate the importance of considering sub-national variation in female empowerment. The FEMI can be readily computed for other countries, and its ability to track spatial and temporal variation in woman's empowerment across a broad set of categories may make it more useful than existing approaches.
| S-EPMC7226653 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Using productivity change as a measure of farm economic performance, we analyze the relationship between women's empowerment in agriculture and farm productivity change and its components, which include efficiency change, technological change, and scale efficiency change. A non-parametric Malmquist approach is used to measure farm specific productivity change and its decomposition. We use a bootstrap regression to analyze factors that cause differences in productivity change and its components, testing, in particular, the role women's empowerment plays. The empirical application focuses on a sample of Bangladesh rice farms over the crop cultivation period 2011 and 2014. Results suggest that improvements in women's empowerment in agriculture were associated with higher levels of productivity change, efficiency change, and technical change, while they had no impact on scale efficiency change. We find that empowering women, specifically, improving their ability to make independent choices regarding agricultural production had a statistically significant positive association with productivity change, efficiency change, and technical change. We also find that lowering the gender parity gap is positively related with improving productivity of the sample farms.
| S-EPMC8336850 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Land size is an important equity concern for the design of 'nutrition-sensitive' agricultural interventions. We unpack some of the pathways between land and nutrition using a cross-sectional baseline survey data set of 4,480 women from 148 clusters from the 'Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition' trial in Keonjhar district in Odisha, India. Variables used are household ln-land size owned (exposure) and maternal dietary diversity score out of 10 food groups and body mass index (BMI; kg/m2 ) (outcomes); and mediators investigated are production diversity score, value of agricultural production, and indicators for women's empowerment (decision-making in agriculture, group participation, work-free time and land ownership). We assessed mediation using a non-parametric potential outcomes framework method. Land size positively affects maternal dietary diversity scores [β 0.047; 95% confidence interval (CI) (0.011, 0.082)] but not BMI. Production diversity, but not value of production, accounts for 17.6% of total effect mediated. We observe suppression of the effect of land size on BMI, with no evidence of a direct effect for either of the agricultural mediators but indirect effects of β -0.031 [95% CI (-0.048, -0.017)] through production diversity and β -0.047 [95% CI (-0.075, -0.021)] through value of production. An increase in land size positively affects women's decision-making, which in turn negatively affects maternal BMI. The positive effect of work-free time on maternal BMI is suppressed by the negative effect of household land size on work-free time. Agriculture interventions must consider land quality, women's decision-making and implications for women's workload in their design.
| S-EPMC7507043 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In this paper, we establish a statistically important relationship between household agricultural income and women's BMI using a five-year panel dataset of rural households drawn from 18 villages across five Indian states. Using within household variation over time, we estimate both the extent to which short-term changes in agricultural income are associated with short-term changes in BMI, and the effect of agricultural income growth on BMI growth over a longer term. Over the longer term, and for the group of households that regularly farm, we find a 10 percentage point agricultural income growth to be associated with a 0.10 percentage point growth in BMI. Consistent with the literature, this effect is economically modest, but important considering that we do not find a corresponding effect for growth in non-agricultural income. We show that both the own-production and market purchase of food are associated with nutritional improvements. While women's BMI is associated with an increase in the consumption of own-produced cereals, the market plays an important role in facilitating access to more nutritious foods like pulses. Lastly, we also find that effects of agricultural income are driven by younger women, in the age-group 15-25 years, who face a particularly strong nutritional disadvantage in India.
| S-EPMC6093637 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper documents a positive relationship between maize productivity in western Kenya and women's empowerment in agriculture, measured using indicators derived from the abbreviated version of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Applying a cross-sectional instrumental-variable regression method to a data set of 707 maize farm households from western Kenya, we find that women's empowerment in agriculture significantly increases maize productivity. Although all indicators of women's empowerment significantly increase productivity, there is no significant association between the women's workload (amount of time spent working) and maize productivity. Furthermore, the results show heterogenous effects with respect to women's empowerment on maize productivity for farm plots managed jointly by a male and female and plots managed individually by only a male or female. More specifically, the results suggest that female- and male-managed plots experience significant improvements in productivity when the women who tend them are empowered. These findings provide evidence that women's empowerment contributes not only to reducing the gender gap in agricultural productivity, but also to improving, specifically, productivity from farms managed by women. Thus, rural development interventions in Kenya that aim to increase agricultural productivity-and, by extension, improve food security and reduce poverty-could achieve greater impact by integrating women's empowerment into existing and future projects.
| S-EPMC5978796 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The strong trends in climate change already evident, the likelihood of further changes occurring, and the increasing scale of potential climate impacts give urgency to addressing agricultural adaptation more coherently. There are many potential adaptation options available for marginal change of existing agricultural systems, often variations of existing climate risk management. We show that implementation of these options is likely to have substantial benefits under moderate climate change for some cropping systems. However, there are limits to their effectiveness under more severe climate changes. Hence, more systemic changes in resource allocation need to be considered, such as targeted diversification of production systems and livelihoods. We argue that achieving increased adaptation action will necessitate integration of climate change-related issues with other risk factors, such as climate variability and market risk, and with other policy domains, such as sustainable development. Dealing with the many barriers to effective adaptation will require a comprehensive and dynamic policy approach covering a range of scales and issues, for example, from the understanding by farmers of change in risk profiles to the establishment of efficient markets that facilitate response strategies. Science, too, has to adapt. Multidisciplinary problems require multidisciplinary solutions, i.e., a focus on integrated rather than disciplinary science and a strengthening of the interface with decision makers. A crucial component of this approach is the implementation of adaptation assessment frameworks that are relevant, robust, and easily operated by all stakeholders, practitioners, policymakers, and scientists.
| S-EPMC2148359 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe Sustainable Development Goals strongly focus on equity. Goal 5 explicitly aims to empower all women and girls, reinforcing the need to have a reliable indicator to track progress. Our objective was to develop a novel women's empowerment indicator from widely available data sources, broadening opportunities for monitoring and research on women's empowerment.MethodsWe used Demographic and Health Survey data from 34 African countries, targeting currently partnered women. We identified items related to women's empowerment present in most surveys, and used principal component analysis to extract the components. We carried out a convergent validation process using coverage of three health interventions as outcomes; and an external validation process by analysing correlations with the Gender Development Index.Findings15 items related to women's empowerment were selected. We retained three components (50% of total variation) which, after rotation, were identified as three dimensions of empowerment: attitude to violence, social independence, and decision making. All dimensions had moderate to high correlation with the Gender Development Index. Social independence was associated with higher coverage of maternal and child interventions; attitude to violence and decision making were more consistently associated with the use of modern contraception.InterpretationThe index, named Survey-based Women's emPowERment index (SWPER), has potential to widen the research on women's empowerment and to give a better estimate of its effect on health interventions and outcomes. It allows within-country and between-country comparison, as well as time trend analysis, which no other survey-based index provides.FundingBill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
| S-EPMC5554795 | biostudies-literature