Two key outputs of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) are the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and the Reach, Benefit, Empower (RBE) framework. An e-survey was used to get a sense of awareness and use of the pro-WEAI and the RBE framework among a target population of potential users (A4NH program stakeholders). More than 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with funders, implementers, and evaluators, mainly but not exclusively associated with GAAP2, to understand how tools were used at different stages of the program/project cycle, from influencing program objectives and outcomes to program/project design to impact evaluation. The evaluation found that even though the pro-WEAI and the RBE framework are relatively new and their use is not yet widespread, their use in projects is growing and they have contributed to changes in project priorities and in how projects seeking to empower women are designed and evaluated.

Agricultural development projects increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but efforts to evaluate their impact have been stymied by the lack of comparable measures. Moreover, the context-specificity of empowerment implies that a quantitative measure alone will be inadequate to capture the nuances of the empowerment process. The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a portfolio of 13 agricultural development projects in nine countries in South Asia and Africa, developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and qualitative protocols for impact evaluations. Pro-WEAI covers three major types of agencies: instrumental, intrinsic, and collective. This paper synthesizes the results of 11 mixed-methods evaluations to assess these projects’ empowerment impacts. The projects implemented the pro-WEAI and its associated qualitative protocols in their impact evaluations. Our synthesis finds mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate indicators of women’s empowerment, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. There were more significant impacts on instrumental agency indicators and collective agency indicators, reflecting the group-based approaches used. We found few significant impacts on intrinsic agency indicators, except for those projects that intentionally addressed gender norms. Quantitative analysis does not show an association between the types of strategies that projects implemented and their impacts, except for capacity building strategies. This finding reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis, given the small number of projects involved. The qualitative studies provide more nuance and insight: some base level of empowerment and forms of agency may be necessary for women to participate in project activities, to benefit or further increase their empowerment. Our results highlight the need for projects to focus specifically on empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of both a common metric to compare empowerment impacts across projects and contexts and qualitative work to understand and contextualize these impacts.

We discuss the evolution of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) from its initial launch in 2018 until early 2023. We explain the reasons motivating changes to the composition of pro-WEAI and the adequacy thresholds of several indicators and discuss the implications of both for the overall measurement of project impacts on women’s empowerment. We present supporting empirical results comparing projects’ impacts calculated using the abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) (the predecessor to pro-WEAI with fewer indicators and less stringent indicator cut-offs), the pilot 12-indicator version of pro-WEAI, and the final, revised 10-indicator version of pro-WEAI, based on longitudinal data from six agricultural development projects in East and West Africa and South Asia as part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). In addition, we assess the sensitivity of the revised pro-WEAI to an alternative weighting scheme, namely inverse covariance weighting (ICW). Overall, we find that the revised pro-WEAI performs well: In comparison to A-WEAI, pro-WEAI—regardless of version—identifies larger and more frequently significant impact estimates, indicating that pro-WEAI is more sensitive to detecting project impacts on women’s empowerment than A-WEAI. And we find only minor differences in impact estimates produced using the 12-indicator, 10-indicator, or alternate weighting scheme versions of pro-WEAI. We conclude with reflections on six years of work on pro-WEAI during GAAP2.

This Open Access book explores the multifaceted nature of agricultural and rural development in Asia and examines the extent to which the Asian experience is being replicated in contemporary Africa. This volume compiles the works of top scholars who provided analyses and evidences from household-level surveys collected for many years in several parts of Asia and Africa. The most important finding presented in this book is that African agricultural development has evolved following the pathways of Asian agricultural development. The common pathways are borrowed technology from abroad and adaptive research in rice farming; secured property rights on natural resources; adoption of ICTs; investments in human capital, including training; and launching of the high-value agriculture. In both continents, agricultural development started in the crop sector, which had a strong tendency to induce the dynamic development of other sectors in rural areas. [Resumen de la editorial]

In alignment with the FAO Policy on Gender Equality 2020-2030, the Assessment describes women’s and men’s specific roles and opportunities in agriculture, and explores the impact of existing gender inequalities on both women’s empowerment and rural development. Rural women are among the main contributors to food production and food processing in Guyana yet women’s access to both productive resources and services is limited. Furthermore, gaps between policy and implementation, and limited availability of sex disaggregated data and gender-sensitive indicators to inform sound policies and budgets have kept Guyanese women marginalized in many sectors. No baselines mean no measurement of progress in effectively implementing the array of commitments towards gender equality and women’s empowerment in agriculture, food security and nutrition, rural development and management of natural resources. In this Assessment, recommendations are formulated to progressively advance gender equality and support the empowerment of rural women through policy, programming, and organisational strengthening. Conducting an agriculture census and work to improve the systems of collection, production and analysis of age- and sex- disaggregated data pertaining to agriculture and rural development and promoting policy research and analysis to inform policies and strategic planning on gender equality and rural women’s empowerment are only some of the suggestions provided to improve the visibility of rural women’s contributions to their households and to the rural economy and address gender inequalities in the agriculture sector.

This Country Gender Assessment (CGA) was commissioned by FAO as part of the regional programme ‘Promoting gender equality through knowledge generation and awareness raising.’ This programme aims to support the review and formulation of gender-responsive sectoral policies and strategy.

Resilient food systems. Zoonoses transmission. Food safety in fresh-food markets. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, phrases that had most often been found in research papers suddenly emerged on the front pages of newspapers and in trending topics on social media. Countries, corporations, and consumers alike struggled to understand not only how to cope with the threat of the disease itself, but also with meeting basic needs, such as food security, nutrition, and health, as lockdowns and mobility restrictions reshaped the world in very unequal ways, seemingly overnight. As a consortium working across five flagship research areas to address some of the world’s greatest challenges in nutrition and health, the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) was uniquely prepared to support policymakers and partners in low- and middle-income countries in their COVID-19 response and recovery efforts and to contribute research evidence on ways to build back better toward a more equitable, food secure, and sustainable future.

This Country gender assessment of agriculture and the rural sector provides in-depth insights into the gendered dimensions of agriculture and rural development in Fiji. The policy environment in rural sector ministries is supportive of gender mainstreaming, with clear paths to link policy direction on gender equality to programmes. Recommendations are formulated to progressively advance gender equality and support the empowerment of rural women through policy. In the short term, recommendations are oriented toward community programming that is more equitable, practical and beneficial for women. Developing infrastructure to reduce women’s workloads and facilitate their ability to engage in the cash economy could enhance women’s economic opportunities and contribute to improved family welfare. Promoting the use of radio, texts and social media to allow women to share information on weather, prices, economic opportunities and savings and banking can empower women to make more informed decisions about their activities. Building the gender analysis capacity of civil society organizations (CSOs) working in rural sectors on climate change, disaster management and sustainable development will support the engagement of women in community-based decision making. To address gender inequalities in the rural sector and support the empowerment of rural women, a set of concrete recommendations is given. These range from promotion of policy research and analysis to inform policies and strategic planning on gender equality and rural women’s empowerment in ARD to putting in place concrete measures for the improvement of rural women’s access to services, technology, finance, markets and resources.

The National Gender Profile of Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods Cambodia provides findings of an assessment of men’s and women’s roles, gender division of labour and gender gaps, including women’s needs and constraints in the agriculture and rural development sectors in Cambodia. It also presents findings from the assessment of policies and frameworks pertaining to gender equality in agricultural and rural development. The assessment reveals that girls and women farmers have been more recognized and given opportunities in Cambodian political and economic activities compared to the past two decades. However, it also unveils the fact that gender inequalities still remain. These include the persisting gender and social norms that place men and boys as superior to women and girls, limited representation and opportunities in leadership tasks and roles and limited educational access to agricultural skills and related technologies. Rural women in particular face limited access to and control over productive and natural resources, services, and to markets and other opportunities to scale up their businesses. It also uncovers that there are still few women holding high-ranking positions at government level, with lower representation in decision-making positions as compared to men.Through a detailed analysis of the various sub-sectors, the policy framework and the main national stakeholders, concrete recommendations are provided for Government, FAO and other relevant partners for strengthening the integration of gender equality dimensions in agricultural and rural development policies and programmes.