The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index

Abstract

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was initially developed as a tool to reflect women's empowerment that may result from the United States government's Feed the Future Initiative, which commissioned the development of the WEAI. The WEAI can also be used more generally to assess the state of empowerment and gender parity in agriculture, to identify key areas in which empowerment needs to be strengthened, and to track progress over time. The WEAI is an aggregate index, reported at the country or regional level, based on individual-level data collected by interviewing men and women within the same households. The WEAI comprises two subindexes. The first assesses the degree to which women are empowered in five domains of empowerment (5DE) in agriculture. It reflects the percentage of women who are empowered and, among those who are not, the percentage of domains in which women enjoy adequate achievements. These domains are (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) control of use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time allocation. The second subindex (the Gender Parity Index [GPI]) measures gender parity. The GPI reflects the percentage of women who are empowered or whose achievements are at least as high as the men in their households. For those households that have not achieved gender Alkire, Meinzen-Dick, Peterman, Quisumbing, Seymour and Vaz The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index parity, the GPI shows the empowerment gap that needs to be closed for women to reach the same level of empowerment as men. This technical paper documents the development of the WEAI and presents pilot data from Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Uganda, so that researchers and practitioners seeking to use the index in their own work would understand how the survey questionnaires were developed and piloted, how the qualitative case studies were undertaken, how the index was constructed, how various indicators were validated, and how it can be used in other settings.

Women's Empowerment in Agriculture and Household‐Level Health in Northern Ghana: A Capability Approach

“…The concept and definition of women's empowerment is subject to an individual's personality, experiences in life, aspirations and culture (Alkire et al, 2013). Kabeer (1999), for example, refers 'empowerment' to expansion in the ability of people to make strategic live choices where this ability has been denied to them.…”

“…age groups and regions) of the country. In addition, many of the previous indices are not able to capture resource control or agency within the agricultural sector (Alkire et al, 2013). The WEAI, which focuses more on the 'agency' aspect of Kabeer's (1999) definition of empowerment, is developed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the International Food Policy Research Institute.…”

“…Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index has two weighted subindexes: the Five Domains of Empowerment (5DE) and the Gender Parity Index (GPI; Alkire et al, 2013). The 5DE and the GPI indexes have 90% and 10% of the weights in the derivation of the WEAI, respectively.…”

“…The variance inflation factor values for all the variables are below 4, which are within the acceptable range, suggesting that these variables are not collinear. The average inadequacy score (CI) for the sample of women is 0.35, implying that the average woman is considered disempowered by using the disempowerment threshold for CI of 0.20 (Alkire et al, 2013). Using this 0.2 disempowerment threshold, 81% of women in the sample are considered disempowered.…”

Mapping the Role of Women in Indian Agriculture

“…In all, backwardness of rural women is not a natural phenomenon and its root, "the dependence syndrome," is to be changed to make women self-reliant, self-propelled, and selfdirected, not only for the sake of women, but also for the sake of Indian agriculture and food security in the future years. Women must be involved in decision-making bodies possessing authorities to initiate structural changes (Alkire et al 2013;Lal and Khurana 2011). As noted earlier, the involvement of women in Indian agriculture is substantive and is going to rise in the coming years.…”