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

Hazel Malapit,Ruth Meinzen-Dick,Jessica Heckert,Kathryn M Yount,Elena M Martinez,Ana Vaz,Greg Seymour,Agnes Quisumbing,Deborah Rubin

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.018

Hazel Malapit, Ruth Meinzen-Dick + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.018

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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.

Highlights

Valid and comprehensive measures of gender equality and women’s empowerment are essential to monitor progress toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5
Many analyses of women’s empowerment have drawn on a typology of power that is rooted in the seminal works of Freire (1968) on freedom and Lukes (1974) on power and articulated with respect to gender and women’s empowerment by Rowlands (1995, 1997)
We focus only on the pro-WEAI to describe the development of the tool

Summary

Introduction

Valid and comprehensive measures of gender equality and women’s empowerment are essential to monitor progress toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. Many analyses of women’s empowerment have drawn on a typology of power that is rooted in the seminal works of Freire (1968) on freedom and Lukes (1974) on power and articulated with respect to gender and women’s empowerment by Rowlands (1995, 1997) This typology juxtaposes the notion of dominating or exerting ‘‘power over” others, with generative forms of empowerment, including ‘‘power within” (involving self-respect, self-efficacy, and an awareness of rights),2 ‘‘power to” (enacting personal goals), and ‘‘power with” (acting collectively toward shared interests) (see, Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007). This framing is common in the academic literature, and in guidance for development programming (e.g., Luttrell & Quiroz, 2009) because of its practical implications

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