Validating measures of women’s empowerment for high-quality, comparable results
What gets measured, gets done—but tools must produce precise, comparable results to enable us to track progress toward women’s empowerment across projects, sectors and regions. Read more.
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Cultivating equality after sowing gender and feminist research principles
Gender equality will flourish if we apply gender and feminist research approaches and move toward transformative change. Read more.
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Tools and methods for gender research and integration in agricultural value chain, market and entrepreneurship projects
This working paper offers guidance on how to integrate gender considerations in value chain development projects. Read more.
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Top 10 reads on gender and entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship can offer opportunities for advancement, but women and youth face more challenges and constraints than men. Read more.
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Spotlight: A growing collection of methods, tools and manuals for better gender research
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A growing collection of methods, tools and manuals to strengthen gender research and guide gender-responsive development work is available via the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform resource hub.
Search by keyword and filter by theme, type, audience, purpose and more to discover resources that can help you measure women’s empowerment, design community engagement processes, map women and men’s different preferences for new crops and much, much more.
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Gender research news from across CGIAR
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Improving methods and building capacity for better gender research
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Forum theatres are an innovative research method—a kind of gender-transformative approach—that in Bangladesh has proved effective for obtaining information about women’s participation in aquaculture. Tested in the palm oil sector, specialized time use methods can be employed in combination with qualitative research to understand intra-household labor dynamics associated with adoption.
Additional methods for understanding intra-household dynamics include an interview guide for assessing women’s and men’s involvement in decision-making within the household. In fact, data from a field experiment in Uganda indicate that sex-disaggregated answers to the same questions amount to little more than perceptions and therefore sex-disaggregated data may be less useful than many assume. Case in point, the data collected in a large-scale survey in rural Ethiopia showed discordant reporting in almost half of households surveyed on intimate partner violence.
A webinar series for CGIAR researchers integrates gender research with other research domains to enhance gender research and its impact, while a recent brief presents 10 strategies and tips for effective, inclusive and ethical research during COVID-19 social distancing, particularly with phone surveys in mind.
This new initiative offers African women an opportunity to design and implement gender-responsive agricultural policies across the continent. For example, a study in Tunisia showed that when digital extension for women is made more inclusive, such as by using inclusive language and improving women’s access to phones, women’s learning and adoption improved. Finally, bridging the yawning gender gaps in agricultural research institutions calls for strategic partnerships to integrate gender responsiveness as part of an organizational change process.
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Advancing and measuring women’s empowerment
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After ten years, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) remains a highly relevant method for measuring progress toward women’s empowerment, not least during the COVID-19 and climate change crises.
Several bespoke variations of WEAI have been developed: The Women's Empowerment in Fisheries and Aquaculture Index (WEFI) can be used to measure the empowerment of women in fisheries and therefore help guide researchers and policymakers on how to overcome gender disparity in the sector. A simplified Abridged Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (A-WENI) can be more easily incorporated into general purpose rural surveys to capture women’s empowerment and nutrition. Within water, sanitation and hygiene, a lack of consensus on how to measure empowerment dominates, and mapping existing indicators to two frameworks frequently used in the empowerment literature has revealed knowledge gaps.
Meanwhile, efforts to advance women’s empowerment continue: Evidence from rice farms in the Philippines suggests that expanding women’s economic options off the farm may help them become empowered in on-farm decision-making. Elsewhere, applying gender analysis to improve seed systems and strengthening women’s access to quality seed seems an essential first step toward women’s empowerment. In northern Ghana, a strong indirect positive association was observed between women and men’s access to vaccines against Peste des Petits Ruminants—a common disease in goats—and empowerment.
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Designing crops and technologies
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Lessons on the use of G+ tools can help gender researchers and breeders make joint, evidence-based decisions to ensure that modern breeding improves gender equality. Complementary tools can guide breeders in identifying the preferences of different customer segments and address persistent gender gaps. Likewise, the TRICOT method can be used in consumer testing to select high-quality root, tuber and banana hybrids from end-user perspectives.
Among sweetpotato farmers in Mozambique, women tended to prefer tasty, marketable and vitamin-rich varieties, while men preferred those resistant to drought and disease. Meanwhile a study from Tanzania indicated that women tended to grow more sweetpotato varieties than men, and in Uganda women were observed to be generally more involved in and more experienced with sweetpotato production than men.
Cases from 13 countries indicate that improved livestock breeds and technologies, such as fodder choppers, can benefit women but also accentuate their double burdens. A Kenyan case study suggests that integrating gender dynamics into improved sheep and goat management practices may strengthen breeding outcomes. In Nigeria, women play an important role in aquaculture and small-scale fisheries, but the opportunities available to them are less profitable and more dangerous than those available to men.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, a new technographic study—observing, describing and studying technologies and their application—is helping researchers develop modern and improved cassava clones that respond to end-users’ preferences. A new study deepens the understanding of women’s and men’s roles in maize plot management to guide gender-responsive maize breeding and seed system interventions. Finally, Rosalind Morris, a trailblazer for women in agriculture and celebrated wheat cytogeneticist, recently passed away at 102.
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Responding to climate change
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Women are more affected by climate hazards than men, and unless women are empowered to be equal participants and decision-makers, ongoing mitigation and adaptation efforts will reinforce the existing inequalities. For example, securing land tenure for women and girls can help promote resilience to climate change impacts, while advancing economic justice and rights.
In Bangladesh, a country highly vulnerable to rising seas and temperatures, climate change and time poverty trap women in a vicious cycle. However, amid the vulnerabilities of a changing climate, innovative and adaptive farming systems may be the light at the end of the tunnel for women and men smallholders.
A new CGIAR initiative—called HER+—works to achieve climate resilience by strengthening gender equality and social inclusion across food systems in the Global South. A conceptual framework and review of related CGIAR work have resulted in recommendations toward a gender-climate-security-nexus agenda for CGIAR.
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Understanding gender in landscapes
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From the likes of Jane Goodall and Wangari Maathai to Greta Thunberg, women across the generations have inspired the world to improve environmental conservation efforts. In the Central Andes region, the cradle of potato diversity, rural women play a vital role in the management of a wealth of native potatoes.
In the Amazon, geospatial services can support local women and other community members in monitoring their territories and addressing challenges such as deforestation, illegal mining, climate change and biodiversity loss. Along the same lines, a new initiative in the Amazon aims to improve gender-sensitive conservation and sustainable development interventions in the region. Meanwhile, the future of Africa’s biodiversity, including the sustainable use of Indigenous plants and organisms, lies in sequencing the continent’s genomes—by and for the African people.
Turning to Vietnam, new research guidelines can help answer how COVID-19 has impacted forest-dependent communities, particularly women and youth; how payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes have impacted women's livelihoods; and how such schemes can be implemented to achieve gender equality goals.
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Fostering opportunities in markets and value chains
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A newly designed methods package includes processes and tools for collaboratively assessing entrepreneurship opportunities with women in the aquatic food sector in Nigeria and beyond. Also on aquaculture, a gendered aquaculture value chain analysis tool can support the process of understanding the different realities of women, youth, minorities, small-scale actors and other vulnerable groups. This is useful in particular because enhancing the sustainability and inclusiveness of smallholder aquaculture production systems requires support to go beyond simple technical and financial assistance.
Key findings from a study in the Democratic Republic of Congo suggest that fewer job and business opportunities were available for women and the youth during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of access to land and financial resources, limited interest in training and restrictive social norms limit Tanzanian women’s abilities to become and succeed as cassava seed entrepreneurs. Also, cassava processing innovations can yield improvements in productivity, but must consider gender aspects to mitigate risks of adverse impacts on women who are often highly represented in the current, small-scale processing. In general, this study finds that more attention should be given to agricultural innovation and scaling support tools and methodologies to address gender or socially marginalized groups.
In India, only a few women consider themselves “farmers”; they struggle to be involved in decisions on wheat farming and agricultural mechanization is pushing women of all castes out of paid employment. Also in Nepal, the interplay between labor out-migration and changes in gender roles affects the maize farming system. According to experts, inclusive policies play important roles in the pursuit of agriculture-driven development and transformative change.
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CGIAR GENDER at the Bonn Climate Change Conference (SBI56)
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In June 2022, the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform will co-organize an official UNFCCC side event with the Women Engage for a Common Future (WECF) and the Women Environment Programme (WEP).
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More CGIAR GENDER conversations
GENDER's virtual discussion group will soon be expanding to include separate spaces and mailing lists dedicated to communities of practice, such as the Women’s Empowerment Measurement Validation Community of Practice. Stay tuned for updates on how to join.
As always, we invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and via @CGIARgender and #GenderInAg.
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Thank you
Thank you to CGIAR centers, initiatives and platforms as well as CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform partners who contributed to this newsletter: Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), International Potato Center (CIP), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), WorldFish. Also the CGIAR initiatives Accelerated Breeding (ABI) Meeting Farmers’ Needs with Nutritious, Climate-Resilient Crops and RAqFS: Resilient Aquatic Food Systems for Healthy People and Planet. CGIAR GENDER Platform partners African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD); CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) also kindly contributed.
Photo credits from the top: Axel Fassio/CIFOR; Axel Fassio/CIFOR; GENDER; GENDER; David Snyder/UN Women; AWARD; IRRI; Susan Umazi Otieno/CIMMYT; Mou Rani Sarker/IRRI; SERVIR Amazonia; M. DeFreese/CIMMYT; Neil Palmer/CIAT.
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