Adapting the Women's empowerment in agriculture index to specific country context: Insights and critiques from fieldwork in India

Abstract

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a direct, multi-dimensional measure of women's access to resources and decision-making in various domains of agriculture. However, several challenges characterize its use: adaptation of questionnaires to local agricultural contexts, modifications to index construction once underlying activities and adequacy thresholds are modified, and sensitivity analysis. In this paper, we address such challenges based on our experience of adapting and using the WEAI across 3600 households in India. In doing so we contribute to the methodological and technical base underlying the index, expand the WEAI evidence base for South Asia, and highlight the importance of tailoring the index to specific agricultural contexts in order to impact public policies in a meaningful way.

Gender equality in climate policy and practice hindered by assumptions

“…Monitoring and evaluation that integrates gender from the outset is necessary to build the evidence base on the links between gender actions, climate change initiatives and ultimate outcomes 72 . To this end, climate policy and practice can draw on emerging standardized measures for empowerment and gender equality, that can tailored to specific contexts 79 . Such measures include, for instance, the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index 80 , the Individual Deprivations Measure 81 -which captures intersectional aspects of multidimensional poverty-and the 'Enabling Gender Equality in Agricultural and Environmental Innovation' project-which offers a methodology for understanding the connection between gender norms and innovation 82 .…”

Vulnerability mapping: A conceptual framework towards a context-based approach to women’s empowerment

“…Some of them, such as the Social Institutions and Gender Index, the Gender Inequality Index, the Gender Gap Index, and the Gender Development Index, aggregate data across several domains, but do not directly measure individual empowerment or disempowerment, and (as are many such scales) are often unable to adequately represent the complex and nuanced situation of a population ( Alkire et al, 2013 ). The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) ( Gupta et al, 2019 ) attempts to address this by measuring at the individual level across five domains relevant to the agricultural sector. The Hunger Project further developed this into a non-sectoral index, the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) ( Nkwake et al, 2017 ).…”

“…Although widely celebrated as a more successful means of assessing WE, there are limitations to this approach that should be highlighted. Gupta et al (2019) conducted a study wherein the WEAI scale was adapted to the Indian context. While the researchers found the tool to be useful and adequate for broader domains, they also were forced to heavily adapt and supplement the survey in order to make it relevant to their particular context.…”

Understanding the pathways to women’s empowerment in Northern Ghana and the relationship with small-scale irrigation

“…A growing interest in building empirical evidence of interventions' contributions to women's empowerment has largely focused on the development of consistent and comparable quantitative measures of empowerment, such as the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Alkire et al 2013;Malapit et al 2019), with regional (e.g., Southeast Asia, Gupta et al 2019) and sector adaptations (e.g., for livestock, Galiè et al 2019). However, quantitative approaches may miss important nuances in local understandings of empowerment and the impact pathways of development interventions that may be uncovered through complementary qualitative research (O'Hara and Clement 2018).…”