The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index – What have we learned? on SlideShare:
The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), a survey-based tool launched in 2012, has been widely used to measure and understand women’s empowerment and inclusion in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was originally designed as a monitoring and evaluation tool for the Feed the Future Initiative (FTF), and has been rolled-out in 19 FTF focus countries. Since then, the WEAI has undergone subsequent rounds of testing and refinement, including a shorter, more streamlined version (the Abbreviated WEAI or A-WEAI), a project-level version suited for different types of agricultural interventions (Project-level WEAI or Pro-WEAI), and a version adapted for measuring empowerment across the value chain (WEAI for Value Chains or WEAI4VC). This webinar will provide an overview of the tool, and take stock of what we’re learning so far on women’s empowerment in agriculture based on results from the FTF surveys, ongoing pilot studies, and other analyses using WEAI data.
The session will begin with an overview of the WEAI tool and the different modifications currently under development, including the pro-WEAI and WEAI4VC. We will briefly discuss how the index is constructed, the different domains and indicators that are measured in the tool, and how these indicators have evolved across the different types of WEAIs. Next, we will present a snapshot of the FTF interim results, highlights from the pro-WEAI and WEAI4VC surveys, and some preliminary findings from a cross-country study on the linkages between different dimensions of women’s empowerment and nutrition outcomes. We will conclude with some suggestions on how the tool can be applied to future projects, and what implications for policy and practice can be drawn from context-specific findings as well as general lessons learned across regions.
Also see: Journal article: Using cognitive interviewing to improve the WEAI survey instruments
Hazel Malapit is Senior Research Coordinator at the Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She coordinates research, training and technical assistance on the implementation of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), manages and coordinates the integration of gender into the research of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), and conducts research on gender, women’s empowerment, agriculture, health and nutrition issues. Before joining IFPRI, she held the Herman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gender and Economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2009-2010, and conducted research on gender, labor market and data issues at the World Bank’s Gender and Development unit (PRMGE). She received her MA in Economics from the University of the Philippines, and her PhD in Economics from American University.
Cheryl Doss is Senior Departmental Lecturer in Development Economics, Department of International Development, Oxford University. In PIM, Cheryl is a member of the program's Management Committee and leader of Flagship 6: Cross-cutting Gender Research and Coordination.
She is a development economist whose research focuses on issues related to assets, agriculture and gender with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Among her research projects, Cheryl co-leads the Gender Asset Gap Project, a large-scale effort to collect data and measure individual asset and wealth holdings for men and women in Ecuador, Ghana, and Karnataka, India. This research examines best practices for collecting individual data on assets and also quantifies women’s ownership of and control over productive assets. Currently, much of her work focuses on how to understand both joint and individual ownership and decision-making within rural households.
Cheryl Doss works with a range of international organizations on issues including best approaches for collecting sex-disaggregated data, gender and agriculture, intrahousehold resource allocation, and women’s asset ownership. In recent years, she has worked with UN Women, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, DFID , the Africa Development Bank, and the UN Foundation on issues of women’s asset ownership. She has published widely in academic journals in economics, agricultural economics, and development studies.
The PIM webinars aim to share findings of PIM’s research, discuss their application, and get feedback and suggestions from participants. Webinars are conducted by PIM researchers in the form of research seminars. Each webinar is a live event consisting of a presentation (30 min) and a facilitated Q&A session (30 min).
