Women are key to rural revitalization in developing countries, but various constraints and obstacles limit their contributions to their households and communities.
During our research seminar on June 12, Elena Martinez and Emily Myers, Research Analysts at IFPRI, Washington DC, presented the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and its modifications as tools that quantify these constraints and obstacles.
Martinez started her presentation by discussing the objectives of gender-sensitive agricultural development programs: reach, benefit and empower. While “reach” programs include women in program activities, “benefit” type of programs aim to increase the wellbeing of women. “Empower” programs are set out to strengthen ability of women to make strategic life choices and to put those choices into action. While each of these types of programming follows different strategies and activities to achieve these aims, all need appropriate indicators to measure women’s empowerment at the project and at the portfolio level.
The WEAI provides such a set of well-defined indicators. It was designed in 2012 to track change in women’s empowerment as a direct or indirect result of interventions under Feed the Future, the US government’s global hunger and food security initiative. It was developed as a collaborative effort between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
The WEAI is an aggregate index reported at the country or regional level and is based on individual interviews with the primary male and the primary female decision-maker within the same household. The WEAI measures ten indicators across five domains of women’s empowerment: (1) production; (2) resources; (3) income; (4) leadership, and (5) time. The Abbreviated WEAI (A-WEAI), designed in 2014, provides a shorter alternative to the WEAI, keeping the five domains but reducing the number of indicators from ten to six. The A-WEAI can be used in population-based surveys to measure women’s empowerment.
Currently, 86 organizations in 53 countries use the WEAI or one of its versions. In a 2014 study, covering 13 countries, Malawi scored a WEAI of 0.84, indicating a medium ranking in terms of women empowerment. With increasing adoption of the WEAI, participating organizations had various demands to fit the WEAI better to their needs, including among others more adaptability to project contexts or attention to health and nutrition topics.
As a result, the Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project Phase 2 (GAAP2) developed the Project Level WEAI (Pro-WEAI) and launched it in 2018. The tool was developed jointly by IFPRI, OPHI, and thirteen partner projects in the GAAP2 portfolio across nine countries in Africa and South Asia. The Pro-WEAI is a survey-based index for measuring empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector. The index is designed to help agricultural development projects assess women’s empowerment in a project setting and to obtain insights into local definitions of empowerment. This mixed-methods approach facilitates a more nuanced understanding of gender roles in agricultural projects. Unlike the WEAI and A-WEAI, the pro-WEAI is composed of 12 indicators organized into three domains: Power within (intrinsic agency), Power to (instrumental agency) and Power with (collective agency); these three domains better reflect the empowerment literature. Pro-WEAI is also made of two sub-indices: three domains of empowerment (3DE) and the Gender Parity Index (GPI).
The pro-WEAI indicators are weighted equally, and a respondent is considered empowered if s/he is adequate in at least 75% of the indicators or 9/12 of the indicators. Figure 1 provides an overview of the indicators that constitute the pro-WEAI.
Figure 1: The 12 indicators in Pro-WEAI
*Click on Figure 1 for full view.
The pro-WEAI carries forward seven indicators of the original WEAI and includes five new indicators, for example including self-efficacy and attitudes towards domestic violence. The tool is intended to measure changes in women’s empowerment over the course of an agricultural development project. Therefore, it focuses on indicators of empowerment that a project could change. There are also optional add-on modules that focus on outcomes related to health, nutrition, or livestock.
Martinez concluded the quantitative presentation with an overview of the findings from cross-country studies that have used the Pro-WEAI.
Next, Myers presented findings from qualitative studies that analyzed the three types of agency in six African countries and the interconnections among the indicators. She noted how the quality of intrahousehold relations, especially trust, influence a women’s mobility in the community and consequently ability to work and income generating income opportunities. A husband who trusts his wife may be less likely to prevent her from leaving the house; she can then go out to work, and consequently contribute financially to her household. The qualitative work also explored local understandings of empowerment. Common across many communities, empowerment was seen as relational, and not individualistic – being “empowered” meant being able to take care of oneself, of family needs, and of others. The complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches have been a key strength in the development and continued adaptation of the (pro-)WEAI instruments.
What’s next for Pro-WEAI? Myers concluded the presentation with an example of the WEAI for value chains (WEAI4VC) currently being implemented in Malawi and Benin. With Pro-WEAI quantitative and qualitative protocols as the starting point, the WEAI4VC expands empowerment measures to cover multiple nodes and different types of actors along the value chain. The production module is expanded to livelihoods, including entrepreneurship and wage work.
The Agriculture Technical Vocational Education and Training (ATVET)-Malawi project aims to increase women’s access to, benefits from, and empowerment from formal and non-formal training in the agri-food sector. ATVET is run by AUDA-NEPAD (the development agency of the African Union) and funded by GIZ. From June 2019 to April 2020, IFPRI will use the WEAI4VC to measure empowerment among beneficiaries to assess the state of empowerment of beneficiary women in the program.
The seminar presentation can be viewed below.
Click here to download the presentation. (PDF 4 MB)
For more information on WEAI please visit the WEAI resource center here.
