Women make up about 43 percent of the agricultural workforce in many developing countries, positioning them in a critical and transformative role in agricultural growth, food and nutrition security, and poverty reduction. Women also play an important role within their families as income earners and caregivers. In 2010, USAID approached IFPRI and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative to design the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). The tool, also supported by PIM since 2012, monitors and supports the inclusion of women in agriculture as part of USAID, under the US Feed the Future initiative. WEAI measures the role and extent of women’s empowerment in agriculture relative to men within their households, providing a way to understand gender dynamics within households and communities. The index also helps identify the women who are disempowered and the areas in which they are disempowered, two major considerations in designing solutions to close the empowerment gap.
Since its launch in 2012, WEAI has been revolutionizing how women’s empowerment and their role in agriculture are seen and measured. The index has been adopted by 19 Feed the Future country programs for monitoring and impact evaluations to understand baseline conditions and track the changes in women’s empowerment as a direct or indirect result of interventions. It has also been used by at least 60 organizations in 39 countries. In Bangladesh, the 2012 BIHS, which collected the WEAI data, helped identify disempowerment gaps and motivated the Ministry of Agriculture to design interventions that will close those gaps. Bangladesh’s 7th Five Year Plan (2016–2020) used the analysis of BIHS and WEAI to reinforce the government’s commitment to ensuring “women’s advancement as self-reliant human beings.”
Because of the interest of many development organizations in adapting the WEAI, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a second phase of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP2), which is working with agricultural development projects to develop and test a project-level WEAI. USAID, along with A4NH, is also supporting this effort, which builds on the original WEAI and will increase its relevance to agricultural development projects.
