HER+ Initiative dissects women’s empowerment and climate resilience in West Bengal using Pro-WEAI

(04 December 2024) – Under the CGIAR Gender Impact Platform’s Methods Module, the CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality (HER+) was granted USD100,000 to apply and scale the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and similar tools and metrics to their climate change research.

WEAI was originally developed for Feed the Future, a US government initiative that aims to address global hunger and food insecurity. It has two sub-indices: the 5 Domains of Empowerment (5DE) and the Gender Parity Index (GPI). The five domains, namely: Production, Resources, Income, Leadership, and Time, measure the level of empowerment of a woman inside the household and in their community. On the other hand, GPI identifies gender gaps in a house by measuring the percentage of women who are as empowered as the men who live within the same household.

HER+ presented its initial findings on the use of project-level WEAI (Pro-WEAI), an iteration of WEAI that is used to measure women’s empowerment at the project level. Work Package 2 – EMPOWER of HER+ Initiative, together with Sattva Consulting, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Indian Veterinary Research Institute (ICAR-IVRI), and other nongovernment organization partners implemented this project in two districts of West Bengal, India.

The project developed and implemented socio-technical innovation bundles (STIBs), a suite of social, technical, and technological innovations tailored to the needs and priorities of the local communities, through multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary engagement and learning hubs called learning labs. The learning lab communities were primarily made up of women small livestock entrepreneurs growing goats and poultry.

HER+ and partners formed these learning labs to implement STIBs to improve women’s climate resilience and empowerment and make them part of solutions, not only the…