The empowerment of women in the livestock sector is fundamental to achieve gender equality. It also is instrumental for increased household productivity and improved household health and nutrition. Diverse strategies exist to empower women, yet these strategies are difficult to prioritize without a reliable and adapted means to measure women's empowerment. One quantitative measure is the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Despite its reliability in certain agricultural contexts, the WEAI requires adaptation in settings where livestock farming is the dominant form of livelihood. Using the WEAI as a starting point, a multidisciplinary team of researchers developed the Women's Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI), a new index to assess the empowerment of women in the livestock sector. This paper presents the WELI and the dimensions of empowerment it includes: (1) decisions about agricultural production; (2) decisions related to nutrition; (3) access to and control over resources; (4) control and use of income; (5) access to and control of opportunities; and (6) workload and control over own time. The paper illustrates the use of the WELI by introducing pilot findings from dairy smallholders in four districts of northern Tanzania. The paper addresses considerations for the appropriate use and adaptation of the WELI to balance the needs for context specificity and crosscultural comparisons; it also discusses its limitations. The paper recommends participatory and qualitative methods that are complementary to the WELI to provide context-specific insights on the processes of women's empowerment in the livestock sector.

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Background: Productive resources are essential to the livelihoods and food security of the world's rural poor. Gender-equal ownership of resources is considered key to increasing agricultural productivity, equity, and food security. However, there has not been much research about local understandings of ownership particularly in the Global South. In addition, research is also lacking about how concepts of ownership affect food security at the household level.Results: This paper discusses the variability of local understanding of ownership by showing seven domains resource ownership was associated with by a small cohort of respondents. It shows the flexibility of systems governing resource entitlements among the studied communities and their impact on food security. It shows that, irrespective of these understandings and systems, resource arrangements favored men.

Sustainable Development Goal 2 aims to end hunger, achieve food and nutrition security and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. This requires that small-scale producers be included in, and benefit from, the rapid growth and transformation under way in food systems. Small-scale producers interact with various actors when they link with markets, including product traders, logistics firms, processors and retailers. The literature has explored primarily how large firms interact with farmers through formal contracts and resource provision arrangements. Although important, contracts constitute a very small share of smallholder market interactions. There has been little exploration of whether non-contract interactions between small farmers and both small- and large-scale value chain actors have affected small farmers’ livelihoods. This scoping review covers 202 studies on that topic. We find that non-contract interactions, de facto mostly with small and medium enterprises, benefit small-scale producers via similar mechanisms that the literature has previously credited to large firms. Small and medium enterprises, not just large enterprises, address idiosyncratic market failures and asset shortfalls of small-scale producers by providing them, through informal arrangements, with complementary services such as input provision, credit, information and logistics. Providing these services directly supports Sustainable Development Goal 2 by improving farmer welfare through technology adoption and greater productivity.

Highlights Current empowerment efforts fail to capture a critical component of empowerment - its relational nature. Individual's empowerment is constituted through the empowerment of others in significant relationship to them. The ability of women to empower themselves is mediated through the deliberative support of others. Community judgment of individual alignment with gender norms determines empowerment outcomes in daily realities. Public adherence to local gender norms creates a safe façade to deviate from the norms.