Policy seminar: Scaling up the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) tool

Research on gender and women’s empowerment in food systems and global development is central to IFPRI’s mission. Here we mark International Women’s Day (March 8)—with the theme “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress”—with an account of our continuing efforts to develop and deploy metrics on women’s empowerment in agriculture.

The 2015 adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5)—achieving women’s empowerment and gender equality—prompted a growth in metrics to monitor global progress toward this goal. With the February 22 launch of the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS), IFPRI Director General Johan Swinnen noted, “we are seeing a major step in the long-running strategy to come up with measurements and metrics for women’s empowerment, in agriculture and beyond.”