1. Gender in agricultural water management: how do we measure it?
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Simone Passarelli, Dar Es Salaam, April 21st, 2016
Gender and Irrigation Technical Workshop
Photo credit: 2006 Freweni Gebre Mariam/IFPRI

2. Empowerment What is it? Why is it important in agriculture?
How do we measure it?
What can the numbers tell us?

3. What is empowerment?
The expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices, within their households and their communities, particularly in contexts where this ability has been limited
Ask first OR
Empowerment is a process; if empowered have the ability to take action; usually measured by resources, decision-making
Similar to Kabeer (2001)
Ability a person has to make and act towards a decision.

4. What is empowerment in agriculture?
A person
Has the resources & opportunity to engage in agricultural activities that are productive
Has a role in deciding how to engage and in agricultural management decisions
Receives and controls the benefits & returns from their efforts in agriculture
If time: Ask for ideas first
Ask: What do we mean by resources?
material, social, knowledge/information, time, health, inputs, etc.
(We used to measure
Household income, wealth, production women’s decision-making in spending, fertility, mobility
Does not get at who is doing what activities with what resources for what benefit and by whose choice )
Does not have to be 50-50, ok to specialize if it is your decision, and if you have control of the products

5. Why is empowerment in agriculture important?

6. This slide shows the Feed the Future Results Framework
This slide shows the Feed the Future Results Framework. It is a conceptual framework that underlies the theory of change for the Feed the Future programs. It describes how the program plans to reach its goals of sustainably reducing global poverty and hunger. It aims to do this through 2 high-level objectives: inclusive agriculture sector growth, and improved nutritional status of women and children. It lists the pathways by which it believes it will get there—and I won’t read them all, but some of them include improved agriculture productivity, expanding markets and trade, etc.

7. Figure 1: linkages between domains of women’s empowerment and agricultural productivity
Hand over to USAID for their discussion
Here is a summary of the pathways through which the dimensions of empowerment contribute to greater agricultural productivity in Feed the Future. It is guided by the Feed the Future results framework, which on the agricultural side has the goal of inclusive agricultural growth. The idea of inclusive growth is to include marginalized populations, such as women and the poor, in the process of agricultural development.
The green arrows indicate direct links and pathways to productivity increases. Starred items indicate the domains that the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index measures.
Some of the dimensions directly affect households’ agricultural productivity, shown with the green arrows.
For example, [GIVE EXAMPLE] [ if you have access to tech – you can purchase better seeds; or make decisions to use fertilizer
But the other components that indirectly promote agricultural productivity are also important.
For example, [GIVE EXAMPLE] [more time / control over time – able to attend trainings & increase human K or be in producer group that gets has better links to extension and gets more technology through extension]
Slide Credit: Feed the Future GIF Presentation

8. Problem/Constraint to Address
GIF Examples (1)
Problem/Constraint to Address
Desired Outcome
Definition of Outcome
Is this problem or constraint relevant in your specific context? Y/N, Please explain and provide evidence.
What activities are you implementing or planning that address this problem? How do they address it?
(Wo)men do not have equal or adequate power or input into household or community decision-making processes related to agriculture/at any stage of agricultural value chains, are excluded for decision-making processes, or make decisions based on external pressures.
Increased Decision-making Power in Agricultural Processes
Beneficiaries engage in decision-making processes related to agriculture within the home or community, either solely or jointly. Beneficiaries have increased autonomy in relation to productive activity
The GIF is both (1) a way to tell your story, and (2) a way to chart your course

9. Activities' Specific Contributions to Desired Outcome
GIF Examples (2)
How could you modify current activities to better address the issues around this topic?
What new activities could be designed to address issues around this topic and how would they address it?
Activities' Specific Contributions to Desired Outcome
What indicators do/will you use to measure the success of activities in terms of this outcome?
Checks
Does the activity strive to …? How? • promote or enable (wo)men's decisionmaking? • promote or enable (wo)men's autonomy? Do indicators measure women’s/men’s • Roles in making decisions about agriculture and/or agriculture-related businesses?

10. *Gender plays a key role in all pathways
Potential Pathways through which Irrigation Influences Nutrition and Health Outcomes and Women’s Empowerment
Production pathway*
Income pathway*
Water supply pathway*
Health risks pathway*
Women’s empowerment pathway*
*Gender plays a key role in all pathways
Our work on SSI has looked at how irrigation is linked with nutrition and health, but we know that gender plays a key role in nutrition and health. So when we look at the pathways by which nutrition and health are linked with irrigation, we see the importance of gender in each of these pathways, and I will describe these on the next slide
Source: Domenech 2015

11. How do we measure empowerment in agriculture?

12. The women’s empowerment in agriculture index
A survey-based tool developed by USAID, IFPRI, Oxford and the Human Development Initiative
The WEAI measures the empowerment, agency and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector using the 5 domains of empowerment (5DE) to the right and the Gender Parity Index
Production, resource, income, leadership and time use
Both of these scores are weighted and aggregated to create the WEAI
WEAI is on a scale from zero to one, with higher values = greater empowerment
The WEAI is a survey-based tool, asked of both the main male and female decisionmakers in a household used to determine inclusion of women in domains important to the agricultural sector. There are multiple domains of empowerment. Whereas previous measurements were only able to measure individual domains, the WEAI has the advantage of measuring five domains that are important in the agricultural sector. The five domains of empowerment in the agricultural sector measured in the WEAI include Production decision-making, access to productive resources, control over use of income, community leadership, and time allocation. These are measured through 10 individual indicators in the survey based tool, and weighted using the weighting scheme listed on the right. In addition to the domains, the WEAI calculated score also includes the Gender Parity Index. This component takes into account the male counterpart’s responses to the 10 indicators and calculates a how many women achieve parity with their husband, and for those who do not, how great is the gap of inadequacy.

13. The 5 domains of empowerment (5DE)

14. Baseline WEAI scores, published 2014
WEAI score: The overall WEAI score for Ghana is The 5DE and GPI scores are presented in Table 1 and discussed below. • 5DE score: The 5DE index value is Overall, percent of women have achieved adequate empowerment. Those who are not yet empowered (72.50 percent) have a mean 5DE score of • GPI score: The GPI is 0.81, and percent of the women in the survey have achieved gender parity. The average empowerment gap between the percent of women without gender parity and the males in their household is 0.27.

15. Wait… what about water?

16. Weai modifications
Technically, we use a “Modified WEAI” for the ILSSI project in order to better capture linkages between irrigation and gender
Modifications to the original WEAI include:
Role in decisionmaking: on irrigated food crop and cash crop farming
Autonomy in decisionmaking: types of crops to grow for irrigated vs. non-irrigated
Productive capital: also includes irrigation tank/pond and irrigation equipment
Access to information/extension: on irrigation methods
Time allocation: time spent irrigating/working with equipment
Added response options on irrigation topics for various questions on credit, savings, group membership
Technically, we use a “modified WEAI” rather than the WEAI itself.
Source: Passarelli, 2015, Tanzania ILSSI Survey Training

17. Pro-WEAI Project
3-year project funded by GAAP2 (The Gates-funded Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project, jointly led by IFPRI and ILRI)
Designed to test the Pro-WEAI (Program Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index) using our irrigation-modified WEAI
Creates a new community of practice around this WEAI tool
IFPRI will produce a paper using the iDE experiment households with our modified WEAI
Photo Credit: IWMI Flikr, Ghana

18. The Survey: Example
Joint decisionmaking

19. WEAI Results from Ethiopia and Tanzania
Irrigators
Non-Irrigators
Contributors to disempowerment
Country
WEAI Score
Gender Parity Index
Ethiopia
0.82 .9
0.85
.91
Group membership
Leisure time
Speaking in public
Credit access
Control over use of income
Tanzania
0.88
.96
0.86
.92
Autonomy in production

20. Thank you!
Photo Credit: IWMI Flikr, Ghana