NEWS

Despite widespread agreement on the importance of women’s empowerment, ambiguity still exists about how best to define and measure it. Authors of the new paper use a framework developed by psychologists and data from Bangladesh and Ghana to examine if intrahousehold decision making (sole or joint) is correlated with autonomous motivation.

The authors use the example of the Buena Milpa agricultural development project to demonstrate how grassroots approaches to collective action, conflict prevention, and social-ecological resilience, linking local stakeholder dynamics to the broader institutional and governance context, can bear fruit amidst postconflict development challenges.

Dr. Frank Place has been selected as the next director of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM), effective August 1, 2018. He will be replacing Dr. Karen Brooks, PIM director since 2012, who will retire in July.

Rapid urbanization in developing countries stimulates interest in understanding the impact of the nature of urbanization on the economies of these countries. The new study investigates relationship between agriculture and different sized cities in Ethiopia, with focus on teff market.

The new paper documents a positive relationship between maize productivity in western Kenya and women’s empowerment in agriculture, measured using indicators derived from the abbreviated version of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index.

Why do property rights for land and other natural resources matter? How do they affect agricultural productivity, environment, gender relations? How do people coordinate with their neighbors, governments, and private sector so that natural resources are used sustainably? And what innovative approaches can researchers offer to help in the process? Dr. Ruth Meinzen-Dick explains.

Researchers have sought to understand what keeps women’s observed rates of agricultural technology adoption low. But what happens after a new technology is adopted by a household? Do women’s lives really become better? Are they more empowered? A new paper explores these questions using the example of adopting small-scale irrigation technologies in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Tanzania.

In this interview, recorded as part of our series "Why is social protection important for agriculture and resilience? Watch our colleagues explain!", Dr. Shalini Roy discusses how transfer programs can affect nutrition and gender relations in a household, and what role behavior change communication has to play.