Empowerment in agricultural value chains: Mixed methods evidence from the Philippines

Women’s participation and empowerment in value chains are goals that concern many development organizations, but there has been limited systematic, rigorous research to track these goals between and within value chains (VCs). We use the survey-based project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to measure women’s and men’s empowerment in the abaca, coconut, seaweed, and swine VCs in the Philippines. Results show that most women and men in all four VCs are disempowered, but unlike in many other countries, Filipino women in this sample are generally as empowered as men. Pro-WEAI results suggest that respect within the household and attitudes about gender-based violence (GBV) are the largest sources of disempowerment for both women and men, followed by control over use of income and autonomy in income-related decisions. Excessive workload and lack of group membership are other important sources of disempowerment, with some variation across VCs and nodes along VCs. Across all four VCs, access to community programs is associated with higher women’s empowerment, and access to extension services and education are associated with higher men’s empowerment. Our results show that, despite the egalitarian gender norms in the Philippines, persistent gender stereotypes influence men’s and women’s empowerment and VC participation.

ABSTRACTBackgroundFew studies have examined the influence of women's participation in farmer groups on female and male empowerment, which is considered essential to improving nutrition.ObjectivesThe study aimed to 1) assess the empowerment of Ghanaian women farmers, 1 adult male family decision-maker per household, and the household gender equality; and 2) investigate the relation of empowerment and household gender equality with women's participation in farmer-based organizations (FBOs), women's and men's nutritional status, and household food security.MethodsA cross-sectional study investigated secondary outcomes using baseline data from a nutrition-sensitive agriculture intervention implemented through FBOs in rural Ghana. Existing FBOs in 8 communities were selected based on 6 criteria (e.g., participation level, readiness to change). Female FBO (n = 166) and non-FBO (n = 164) members together with a male family member (n = 205) provided data on individual and household characteristics; empowerment was measured across 11 indicators with the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Generalized linear mixed models tested the associations of empowerment and household gender equality with FBO membership, nutritional status, and household food security.ResultsWomen's FBO membership was associated with an increased likelihood of women's empowerment [adjusted odds ratio (aOR): 3.25; 95% CI: 1.97, 5.33] and household gender parity (aOR: 2.82; 95% CI: 1.39, 5.84) but not men's empowerment. Household food insecurity, but not nutritional status, was positively associated with women's FBO participation and individual empowerment indicators (financial services). Food insecurity was negatively associated with the women's empowerment indicator related to attitudes about domestic violence [adjusted β coefficient (aβ): −0.78; 95% CI: −1.35, −0.21] and men's overall empowerment (aβ: −0.79; 95% CI: −1.58, −0.01).ConclusionsUnderstanding the complexity in which FBO participation, empowerment, nutritional status, and food security are linked is critical in designing interventions that promote gender equality and improved nutrition.This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT03869853.

PROTOCOL: The effects of road infrastructure, and transport and logistics services interventions on women's participation in informal and formal labour markets in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review.

Value chain interventions have become widespread throughout the international development sector over the last 20 years, and there is a need to evaluate their effectiveness in improving women's welfare across multiple dimensions. Agricultural value chains are influenced by socio-cultural norms and gender dynamics that have an impact on the distribution of resources, benefits, and access to opportunities. While women play a critical role in agriculture, they are generally confined to the least-valued parts of the value chain with the lowest economic returns, depending on the local, social and institutional contexts. The review assesses the effectiveness of approaches, strategies and interventions focused on women's engagement in agricultural value chains that lead to women's economic empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. It explores the contextual barriers and facilitators that determine women's participation in value chains and ultimately impact their effectiveness. We searched completed and on-going studies from Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection (Social Sciences Citation Index [SSCI], Science Citation Index Expanded [SCI-EXPANDED], Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science [CPCI-S], Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science & Humanities [CPCI-SSH], and Emerging Sources Citation Index [ESCI]), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, EconLit, Business Source Premier, APA PsycInfo, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane, Database of Systematic Reviews, CAB Abstracts and Sociological Abstracts. We also searched relevant websites such as Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR); the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); AgriProFocus; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF); Donor Committee for Enterprise Development; the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); the International Labour Organisation (ILO); the Netherlands Development Organisation; USAID; the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation; the International Food Policy Research Institute; World Agroforestry; the International Livestock Research Institute; the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS); AGRIS; the IMMANA grant database; the 3ie impact evaluation database; Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA); The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL); the World Bank IEG evaluations; the USAID Development Data Library; Experience Clearinghouse; the proceedings of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy conference; the proceedings of the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference; the proceedings of the North East Universities Development Consortium (NEUDC) Conference; and the World Bank Economic Review. The database search was conducted in March 2022, and the website search was completed in August 2022. The review includes value chain interventions evaluating the economic empowerment outcomes. The review includes effectiveness studies (experimental and non-experimental studies with a comparison group) and process evaluations. Two review authors independently assessed studies for inclusion, extracted data, critically appraised the studies, and synthesised findings. We found that value chain interventions are successful in improving the economic conditions of their intended beneficiaries. The interventions were found to improve women's economic outcomes such as income, assets holdings, productivity, and savings, but these effects were small in size and limited by low confidence in methodological quality. The meta-analysis suggests that this occurs more via the acquisition of skills and improved inputs, rather than through improvement in access to profitable markets. The qualitative evidence on interventions points to the persistence of cultural barriers and other constraints. Those interventions implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are consistently more successful for all outcomes considered, although there are few studies conducted in other areas of the world. The review concludes that value chain interventions empower women, but perhaps to a lesser extent than expected. Economic empowerment does not immediately translate into empowerment within families and communities. Interventions should either moderate their expectations of empowerment goals, or they should be implemented in a way that ensures higher rates of participation among women and the acquisition of greater decision-making power.

Women’s participation is vitally important in agriculture so also in cultivation of tuber crops. In Kerala, cassava is cultivated mostly in homestead farming with active participation of the women. Gender analysis was conducted to map the profile characteristics and empowerment of men and women. Hundred respondents doing cassava cultivation were selected from Thiruvananthapuram and Pathanamthitta districts of Kerala. Majority (61.53%) of the women and men (68.57%) had medium level of participation in cassava cultivation. The overall empowerment index of men (0.86) was more than women (0.78). Employment generation and economic benefits in cassava cultivation for men and women were also assessed.

This paper introduces value chain analysis and development as tools for addressing gender inequities in markets. We describe how factors such as access to assets, gendered education differentials and the nature and value of economic activities affect the way in which men and women participate and gain in value chains, distinguishing among household, institutional and chain levels of analysis. Current empirical evidence for the role of upgrading in value chains in impacting gender inequities in markets is weakened by our as yet imperfect understanding of the issues. However, horizontal coordination can reduce gender-related disparities in bargaining and management power as a precursor to stronger vertical relationships. Improvements in processes, products and functional distribution in value chains can improve chain-level outcomes leading to women's empowerment and, ultimately, to improved household poverty outcomes. However, this progression from positive impacts to desirable outcomes is not a given and depends on often complex context-specific socio-cultural norms. In particular, the benefits of women's participation in agricultural value chains are determined by their control of productive resources and household level decisions. Where both sexes play a role in decision making generic interventions, or even those applied to men only, can benefit both sexes. Where women do not participate in spending decisions a more gender-specific approach that targets underlying gender issues in households and institutions is required. We illustrate that unsound gender analyses can miss the point, resulting in flawed understanding of the real issues and ineffective or even damaging interventions. We conclude that the universal application of packages of generic 'default' interventions risk doing harm and that upgrading strategies should be applied on a case by case basis and only after a thorough and robust analysis of causal factors. We outline for practitioners what a robust analysis should look like and present a menu of policy options for acting to promote gender equity and reduce poverty using the value chain analysis and development approach.

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.

PROTOCOL: The Effects Of Economic Self‐Help Group Programs On Women's Empowerment: A Systematic Review

Objectives: This study empirically assesses the impact of the changes in women's characteristics, empowerment, availability and quality of health services on woman's decision to use antenatal care (ANC) and the frequency of that use during the period 2000-2008. Study Design: The study is a cross-sectional analytical study using 2000 and 2008 Egypt Demographic and Health Surveys. Methods: The assessment of the studied impact is conducted using the Zero-inflated Negative Bi- nomial Regression. In addition, Factor Analysis technique is used to construct some of the expla- natory variables such as women's empowerment, the availability and quality of health services in- dicators. Results: Utilization of antenatal health care services is greatly improved from 2000 to 2008. Availability of health services is one of the main determinants that affect the number of an- tenatal care visits in 2008. Wealth index and quality of health services play an important role in raising the level of antenatal care utilization in 2000 and 2008. However, the impact of the termi- nated pregnancy on receiving ANC increased over time. Conclusions: Further research of the de- terminants of antenatal health care utilization is needed, using more updated measures of wo- men's empowerment, availability and quality of health services. In order to improve the provision of antenatal health care services, it is important to understand barriers to antenatal health care utilization. Therefore, it is advisable to collect information from women about the reasons for not receiving antenatal care. * Corresponding author.

This paper examines innovations for bridging gender gaps in agricultural value chains in Africa. It focuses on innovative platforms for addressing gender gaps, considering women contribute up to 40 percent of labor in agricultural production. Women remain at the bottom of value chains and face gender-specific constraints attributable to gender and social norms, discriminatory beliefs and practices, gender-blind designs and delivery of technologies and innovations which impede women s participation in value chains. Consequently, women are unable to adjust to challenges and opportunities of technological progress, commercial orientation, and global integration. This paper suggests that gender-sensitive technological and institutional innovations is essential to promote women s participation in agricultural value chains and bridge the gender gap while upholding gender-specific outcomes. The study shows that women rely on alternative institutional innovations and arrangements such as group-based approaches in order to improve their participation in value chains which implies the call for policies that nurture and strengthen these kinds of institutions. Integrating research, designing value chain interventions and monitoring and evaluation with a gender lens is essential in order to accelerate women s participation in value chain development programmes, while allowing them to be role models and spearhead their own empowerment. Acknowledgement : We acknowledge the financial support from the Center for Development Research under PARI project

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.

PurposeWomen’s empowerment remains a key development challenge in Kenya. The purpose of this study is to attempt to understand the status of women’s empowerment and the key contributors to their disempowerment in Kenya’s aquaculture sector.Design/methodology/approachA cross-sectional survey was conducted on 534 male and female fish farmers from 300 households drawn from six counties in Kenya (Kakamega, Kisumu, Kisii, Kiambu, Meru and Nyeri). The Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) was adapted to Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Fisheries and Aquaculture Index (A-WEFI) to suit the aquaculture and fisheries sub-sector. The adapted A-WEFI was then used to estimate and the status of women’s and men’s using five domains of empowerment (5DE) and a gender parity index (GPI). Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Cramer’s V and sensitivity analysis as test statistics.FindingsAbout 86% of the men and 80% of the women were classified as empowered. The mean score of the 5DE was 0.93 and 0.95 for women and men, respectively. In addition, 82% of the households achieved gender parity, suggesting that for such households, empowerment of men was no greater than that of women. Overall, the results suggest no major differences between the empowerment of women and men. Findings suggest areas of improvement in empowerment: when observed separately, women report lack of agency in production, resource, time-use and allocation and leadership.Originality/valueThis paper adapts the A-WEAI to the fisheries and aquaculture context, in bid to bridge the gap in standard women’s empowerment measurement methods in this area. Also, there are limited empirical studies on the multifaceted empowerment of women in aquaculture in Kenya. The findings are meant to serve as a point of reference for policymakers, as they develop gender-responsive intervention programmes, and in implementing gender mainstreaming in Kenya.

Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system. We find that the value chain and the specific node of engagement matter, as do other individual and household characteristics, but in different ways depending on country context. Entrepreneurship—often engaged in by wealthier households with greater ability to take risks—is not necessarily empowering for women; nor is household wealth, as proxied by their asset ownership. Increased involvement in the market is not necessarily correlated with greater gender equality. Education is positively correlated with higher empowerment of both men and women, but the strength of this association varies. Training and extension services are generally positively associated with empowerment but could also exacerbate the inequality in empowerment between men and women in the same household. All in all, culture and context determine whether participation in value chains—and which node of the value chain—is empowering. In designing food systems interventions, care should be taken to consider the social and cultural contexts in which these food systems operate, so that interventions do not exacerbate existing gender inequalities.

This review paper highlights the essential requirement of women in agricultural practices and emphasizes gender equality and their contribution to household productivity and food security. The paper discusses the various stages of the value chain and identifies entry points for interventions aimed at enhancing women's participation and benefits and also evaluates the efforts meant to empower women within the agriculture sector, especially to determine women's involvement in the Agricultural Value Chain (AVC). Evaluation of women's empowerment using diverse approaches such as the REBT Framework, and WEAI in various countries was analyzed by using the PRISMA framework and concluded with the emerging new methodology of PRO-WEAI developed by IFPRI to focus on the empowerment of women relevant to the value chain. WEAI-type tools allow for direct comparison between men and women in the same households. This approach offers additional advantages, such as having an explicit link to empowerment theory and using both qualitative and quantitative data to develop and validate the Index. The paper concludes that the emergence of pro-WEAI offers a streamlined and improved tool for analyzing intrahousehold characteristics. It incorporates a gender parity index, enhancing the measurement process. This index is also utilized for calculating GDP per capita, providing a more accurate assessment of economic conditions. Overall, pro-WEAI's concise structure and comprehensive approach make it a superior choice for measuring women's empowerment in the agricultural sector.

It is widely assumed that women's empowerment plays a key role in achieving sustainability in agriculture. However, there is a lack of empirical analysis to support this claim and operationalise the concept of women's empowerment. Furthermore, it has not been formally demonstrated through which farming practices women's empowerment can contribute to the development of sustainable agriculture, or whether gender empowerment is indeed meaningful compared with other well‐documented social drivers. We calculated frontier eco‐efficiency, taking into account specific environmental pressures (i.e., soil biodiversity loss) and public goods (i.e., plant diversity) as desirable outputs in small crop farms, which dominate in Central and Eastern European countries (Poland, Romania, Serbia and Moldova), based on a survey conducted in a sample of 1630 units. We estimated the impact of different levels of women's and men's empowerment on eco‐efficiency in the context of other time‐invariant socio‐economic factors (i.e., succession, age, education and specialisation) in a two‐stage double‐bootstrapped Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. A set of four levels of gender empowerment was defined, taking into account social participation and decision‐making power. We then assessed the degree of input and output inefficiency associated with each level of gender empowerment. The general conclusion is that lower levels of women's empowerment have a negative impact on eco‐efficiency. Therefore, the issue of gender empowerment, not only in terms of equality, decision‐making and access to resources, but also in terms of social participation, should be emphasised in sustainable agriculture policies, on a par with the issue of ageing farmers and farm succession.