After much international discussion about hunger and agricultural development in 2012, it’s time to walk the talk, says the latest Global Food Report – and ensure women are not left behind in the dust.
The 2012 Global Food Report, produced by the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and published earlier this year, recognizes the high level of attention attributed to gender in 2012 – and the importance of gender equality for the promotion of agricultural growth and food security. It cites increases in funding and focus on gender issues from international entities such as CGIAR, the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and US Agency for International Development (USAID).
But the report also stresses that the time has come to move from attention to action.
Action means finding ways to close the gender gap in access to agricultural resources, education, extension, and financial services. It includes investing in labor-saving and productivity-enhancing technologies and infrastructure to free women’s time for more productive activities. It involves finding ways to facilitate their participation in rural labor markets and market value chains. And it incorporates analyses of ways to “change the rules of the game” with gender transformative approaches, such as giving women rights to inherit and own land, strengthening their human and social capital, or training women in income-generating activities.
Finding ways to boost women’s empowerment is important, too, as it is highly correlated with improved agricultural productivity, food security, and nutrition.
However, that requires the ability to define, measure, and analyze empowerment. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, featured in the Global Food Report, has been designed to meet this need. Launched in 2012, the index was developed by IFPRI in collaboration with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. It measures indicators of empowerment based on questions related to five domains: decision making about agricultural production, control over productive resources, control over income, leadership participation, and time use allocation (see picture below, click to enlarge). It generates scores that can be used to compare gender parity within households, assess it across different programs, and track changes over time.
The index is a useful tool for drawing attention to ways that agricultural programs can boost women’s empowerment. Likewise it can help identify ways programs may inadvertently disempower women, by aggravating their labor burdens or control over resources, for example.
In its pilot phase, researchers with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) applied the index to a project evaluating the impacts of a livestock microcredit and two livestock value chain projects on women’s empowerment in Kenya.
The results helped highlight comparisons in empowerment not only between men and women within a household but also among women in male- or female-headed households and across different program interventions. For example, it found that women in the value-chain programs were more empowered if they were in a female-headed household, where they could keep control over the extra money gained, but were more disempowered in male-headed households, where men increasingly took control of the rising family income.
The effort to increase gender equity and women’s empowerment is gaining ground, according to the 2012 Global Food Report. But concrete efforts are needed to lock in these gains. Partnerships, participatory research, and political will should be directed at ensuring the active inclusion of men and women in the development, implementation, and monitoring of gender-equitable agricultural development. They cannot be a passing trend, but must endure, if all the talk of battling hunger and improving lives is to become a reality.
For more information:
2012 Global Food Report – Chapter 4, Closing the Gender Gap. By Ruth Meinzen-Dick and and Agnes Quisumbing, (IFPRI)
2012 Global Food Report, International Food Policy Research Institute. (IFPRI)
Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (IFPRI)
Evaluating the impacts of livestock microcredit and value chain programs on women’s empowerment using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Presentation by Elizabeth Waithanji, Jemimah Njuki, Edna Mutua, Luke Korir and Nabintu Bagalwa, Nairobi, Kenya – 25 February 2013 (ILRI)
Walk the Talk: Taking Action to Fight Hunger (IFPRI)
Photo credit: Akram Ali/CARE Bangladesh Strengthening the Dairy Value Chain (SDVC) project