Women’s Empowerment in Africa: Critical Reflections on the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI)

Addison, Lincoln; Schnurr, Matthew A.; Gore, Christopher; Bawa, Sylvia; Mujabi-Mujuzi, Sarah

doi:10.1017/asr.2021.33

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…An increase in empowerment, then, does not necessarily translate to an increase in well-being. As suggested by other studies (Farnworth et al, 2018;Richardson, 2018;Addison et al, 2021), this finding suggests that using composite, international indexes to measure empowerment may be tricky because they do not consider that women may view empowerment di↵erently based on the social context in which they live.…”

Section: Parallel Trendsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Thriving in the Rain: Natural Shocks, Time Allocation, and Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh

Vitellozzi

Giannelli

2023

SSRN Journal

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Section: Parallel Trendsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Thriving in the Rain: Natural Shocks, Time Allocation, and Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh

Vitellozzi

Giannelli

2023

SSRN Journal

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“…The transcriptions were coded using Nvivo to organise, analyse, and highlight the trends and nuances in the results. A quantitative approach was not used to summarise the results related to women's experiences, as these would fail to capture the nuances of local contexts and intra-household dynamics [55]. Instead, woman's accounts were used to describe their perceptions and the complex realities of their lives.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Possibilities for Women’s Empowerment through Agroecology in Himachal Pradesh, India

Behl,

Osbahr,

Cardey

2023

Sustainability

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In 2018, the state of Himachal Pradesh in north India launched an initiative to convert all its farmers to natural farming (NF), an agroecological approach. The aim was to address multiple challenges related to rural livelihoods, high input costs, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. This paper is based on a qualitative case study of the state programme to transition farmers to NF. It seeks to understand how its mechanisms support and empower small and marginal women farmers. In addition to identifying mechanisms that facilitate the effective uptake of NF, the case study sought women’s views on whether these mechanisms increased spaces for decision making and developed capabilities and autonomy. Framed within the vision of reclaiming food sovereignty, various mechanisms such as training in villages, participating in NF groups and networks, visits to model farms, and adopting leadership roles offered new pathways for women farmers to gain confidence and capabilities. Women began to participate in spaces that had been culturally and structurally denied to them. This case study demonstrates how agroecology initiatives, with a particular emphasis on gender, can offer women various opportunities for decision making, income generation, and creative expression. These initiatives also expand community agency and enable the acquisition of knowledge necessary for sustainable ecosystems.

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The Tyranny of Tools: The Politics of Knowledge Production in Gender Research

Cullen,

Lefore,

Debevec

et al. 2024

Gender, Power and Politics in Agriculture

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This chapter examines the trajectory of analytical frameworks and gender tools intended to understand and address the challenges and inequities that shape women’s engagement in agriculture. We argue that while a focus on tools in many agricultural development projects can help to identify barriers faced by women, it often does little to address the structural inequality in which women are embedded. We highlight the tendencies of tool-led gender analysis within agricultural projects to: (1) detach tools from their theoretical frameworks, (2) ignore the structural and socio-political obstacles to gender equality in specific contexts, and (3) view tools as silver bullets to address “gender problems” while primarily serving technical agendas. We argue that the co-option, sanitization and de-politicization of gender tools is partly the result of social scientists having to fit within institutional systems dominated by certain scientific logics, frameworks, disciplinary orientations, and social norms. We recommend that meaningful attempts to facilitate gender equality and women’s empowerment should be based on politically informed, contextualized understandings that are relevant to people’s lived realities, rather than concepts, tools, and data that are externally constructed and applied by outsiders to meet normative scientific, donor, and development agendas.

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Women’s Empowerment in Africa: Critical Reflections on the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI)

Cited by 7 publications

References 27 publications

Thriving in the Rain: Natural Shocks, Time Allocation, and Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh

Thriving in the Rain: Natural Shocks, Time Allocation, and Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh

New Possibilities for Women’s Empowerment through Agroecology in Himachal Pradesh, India

The Tyranny of Tools: The Politics of Knowledge Production in Gender Research

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