completed· Livelihoods· Health

Capacity building on the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index

The project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), is a tool to measure women’s empowerment in agricultural development projects. This measurement tool helps diagnose areas of disempowerment to design research and development programs that address these areas. IFPRI will provide training and implementation support to a cohort of 12 IDRC projects on women’s empowerment in agriculture (eight projects from Cultivating Africa’s Future fund and four from the Livestock Vaccine Innovation Fund) to strengthen their capacity to use the pro-WEAI for data collection and analysis. IDRC will need sound methods and indicators to measure women’s empowerment to learn which types of projects or project implementation strategies do and do not work to empower women. Establishing a common set of tools and indicators will facilitate the synthesis of lessons learned during and at the end of the projects. In-person training will provide project teams with the fundamentals of a pro-WEAI course. After this training, participants will be familiar with the Reach, Benefit, Empower framework as applied to their projects; the components of the pro-WEAI; survey and qualitative data collection and analysis; and reporting on the index and qualitative results, including identifying project impacts on different aspects of empowerment. In addition, IFPRI will provide follow-up technical support as project teams roll out the pro-WEAI. This will take the form of a helpdesk related to questions on the instruments, pretesting, enumerator training, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. IFPRI will also validate projects’ methodology and calculation files and review project reports to ensure appropriate reporting, analysis, and interpretation of pro-WEAI results. The use of the pro-WEAI tool across the cohort of IDRC projects will ensure joint testing of the tool, shared results and lessons, and cross-project learning on women’s empowerment within IDRC-funded projects. The collaborative work will lead to a peer reviewed publication on implementing women’s empowerment in the agriculture index in research for development projects.