The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) produced a 2011 report on women in agriculture with a clear and urgent message: agriculture underperforms because half of all ...farmers-women-lack equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. This book builds on the report’s conclusions by providing, for a non-specialist audience, a compendium of what we know now about gender gaps in agriculture.
The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) measures the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector and comprises two subindexes. The first assesses empowerment of ...women in five domains, including (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) control of use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time allocation. The second subindex measures the percentage of women whose achievements are at least as high as men in their households and, for women lacking parity, the relative empowerment gap with respect to the male in their household. This article documents the development of the WEAI and presents pilot findings from Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Uganda.
This paper critically reviews some recent attempts to increase poor female farmers’ access to, and control of, productive resources, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It surveys the ...literature from 1998 to 2008 that describes interventions and policy changes across several key agricultural resources. Compared to interventions designed to increase investment in human capital, only a minority of interventions or policy changes increasing female farmers’ access to productive resources have been rigorously evaluated. Future interventions also need to pay attention to the design of alternative delivery mechanisms, tradeoffs between practical and strategic gender needs, and to culture- and context-specificity of gender roles.
•Three studies in India and Bangladesh use pro-WEAI to examine empowerment impacts of agricultural interventions and labor market changes.•Pro-WEAI shows potential in detecting empowerment impacts ...within the project lifespan.•Findings suggest the need for intentionality in designing women’s empowerment projects.•It is important to collect data on both women and men to track progress toward both women’s empowerment and gender equality.
This introduction to a special section describes how a recently developed measure, the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) can be used to assess empowerment impacts of agricultural development interventions in India and Bangladesh as well as broader changes in rural labor markets. The special section comprises three papers. The first examines the impact of membership in self-help groups in five states in rural India on women’s and men’s empowerment and gender equality. The second presents experimental evidence from a pilot project in Bangladesh that provided trainings in agricultural extension, nutrition behavior change communication, and gender sensitization to husbands and wives together. The third investigates changes in women’s roles within the jute value chain in the Southern Delta region of Bangladesh as household members migrate out of the study area and the availability of male labor declines. Although these papers focus on Bangladesh and India, pro-WEAI can be applied to impact assessments of agricultural development projects more generally. The three papers show both the usefulness of this new measure in detecting changes in empowerment indicators within the lifespan of a project and the value of having explicit empowerment objectives in agricultural development projects. The papers also demonstrate the value of having data on both men and women so that project designers can be more intentional about including both of them and monitoring outcomes for both to promote more gender equitable outcomes.
Using a nationally representative survey from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, measured using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and per ...capita calorie availability, dietary diversity, and adult body mass index (BMI). Accounting for potential endogeneity of empowerment, we find that increases in women’s empowerment are positively associated with calorie availability and dietary diversity at the household level. Overall, household wealth, education, and occupation are more important than women’s empowerment as determinants of adult nutritional status, although negative impacts of group membership and credit on male BMI suggest that intrahousehold trade-offs may exist.
•Women’s empowerment is associated with improvements in the dietary quality of adults.•Results suggest the emergence of strong preferences for adolescent boys.•Maternal schooling plays a more ...important role for younger children.•Women’s preferences in allocating nutritious food may be influenced by social norms.•Different domains of empowerment matter for diet quality outcomes across the life course.
Using nationally-representative survey data from rural Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture and indicators of individual dietary quality. Our findings suggest that women’s empowerment is associated with better dietary quality of individuals within the household, but the strength of this association varies across the life course. Women’s empowerment is correlated with more diverse diets of children under five, but empowerment measures are not consistently associated with increases in nutrient intake for this age group. Rather, maternal schooling and household socio-economic status play a more important role for younger children. Women’s empowerment is positively and significantly associated with adult men’s and women’s dietary diversity and nutrient intakes. Empowerment does not benefit all individuals within the household equally, with gender bias emerging in adolescence. Variations in the strength of the association between women’s empowerment and different individuals’ dietary quality across the life course has implications for the design and targeting of interventions to improve dietary quality, particularly of women, children, and adolescent girls.
Gender and Sustainability Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Kovarik, Chiara; Quisumbing, Agnes R
Annual review of environment and resources,
10/2014, Letnik:
39, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Sustainability and gender have been prominent on the development agenda since the 1980s, but there has been little systematic study of the links between the two. This review draws on ecofeminist ...theory, feminist political ecology, intrahousehold literature, and natural resource management case studies and reviews to examine how gender shapes the motives, means, and opportunities for men and women to contribute to sustainability. Particular attention is given to evidence on closeness to nature, focus on conservation, rights to resources, opportunities to exploit resources, and constraints to adoption of sustainable practices. Despite early claims that women are naturally more conserving of resources, the empirical literature, in particular, gives a more mixed and nuanced picture. Conservation is influenced not only by gender but also by a host of tangible and intangible factors, including local ecology, context, and culture, that affect incentives and the ability to adopt sustainable extraction and provision practices.
•Examines empowerment–nutrition links using a new survey-based empowerment measure.•Empowerment is more strongly associated with diet quality than nutrition status.•Credit decisionmaking is ...associated with better outcomes for both women and girls.•Different domains of empowerment may have different impacts on nutrition.
This paper investigates linkages between women’s empowerment in agriculture and the nutritional status of women and children using 2012 baseline data from the Feed the Future population-based survey in northern Ghana. Using a new survey-based index, the women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, we conduct individual-level analyses of nutrition-related indicators including exclusive breastfeeding, children’s dietary diversity score, minimum dietary diversity and minimum acceptable diet, children’s height-for-age, weight-for-height, and weight-for-age z-scores, and women’s dietary diversity score and body mass index. Results suggest that women’s empowerment is more strongly associated with the quality of infant and young child feeding practices and only weakly associated with child nutrition status. Women’s empowerment in credit decisions is positively and significantly correlated with women’s dietary diversity, but not body mass index. This suggests that improved nutritional status is not necessarily correlated with empowerment across all domains, and that these domains may have different impacts on nutrition.
We use household survey data from Nepal to investigate relationships between women's empowerment in agriculture and production diversity on maternal and child dietary diversity and anthropometric ...outcomes. Production diversity is positively associated with maternal and child dietary diversity, and weight-for-height z-scores. Women's group membership, control over income, reduced workload, and overall empowerment are positively associated with better maternal nutrition. Control over income is positively associated with height-for-age z-scores (HAZ), and a lower gender parity gap improves children's diets and HAZ. Women's empowerment mitigates the negative effect of low production diversity on maternal and child dietary diversity and HAZ.
•Reform of family law and land registration in Ethiopia both improve gender equality.•Awareness of land registration shifts perceptions to equal asset division on divorce.•Women on Land Committees ...shift perceptions to equal asset division on divorce.
There is growing interest in how reforms in different policy areas can be formulated in order to be consistent in promoting gender equality and empowering women. We use data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS) to show how two seemingly unrelated reforms—community-based land registration, undertaken since 2003, and changes in the Family Code implemented in 2000—may have created conditions that reinforce each other in improving gender equity. Our findings suggest that the land registration process and the reform of the Family Code had mutually reinforcing effects on women’s rights and welfare.
PDF
