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Women’s empowerment and gender equality in agricultural value chains: evidence from four countries in Asia and Africa
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Abstract
Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system. We find that the value chain and the specific node of engagement matter, as do other individual and household characteristics, but in different ways depending on country context. Entrepreneurship—often engaged in by wealthier households with greater ability to take risks—is not necessarily empowering for women; nor is household wealth, as proxied by their asset ownership. Increased involvement in the market is not necessarily correlated with greater gender equality. Education is positively correlated with higher empowerment of both men and women, but the strength of this association varies. Training and extension services are generally positively associated with empowerment but could also exacerbate the inequality in empowerment between men and women in the same household. All in all, culture and context determine whether participation in value chains—and which node of the value chain—is empowering. In designing food systems interventions, care should be taken to consider the social and cultural contexts in which these food systems operate, so that interventions do not exacerbate existing gender inequalities.
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is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, and leads the cross-cutting research theme on gender. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from the University of the Philippines, Quezon City, was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Visiting Fellow at the Economic Growth Center, Yale University, and an economist at the World Bank. She has published widely on gender, intrahousehold allocation, women’s empowerment, property rights, poverty, and economic mobility, and has done field work in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, and the Philippines. She is undertaking impact evaluations of nutrition-sensitive agricultural development programs in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on their impacts on women’s empowerment and gender asset inequality. She is co-developer of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and is co-editor of Gender in agriculture and food security: Closing the knowledge gap. She is currently developing a measure of women’s empowerment that can be included in surveys implemented by national statistical systems.
is a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, she addresses research questions related to 1) adolescent/youth health and wellbeing, 2) the development of metrics to measure women’s empowerment, 3) the impact of agricultural development interventions on women’s empowerment and other gender-related outcomes, and 4) the intersection of household gender dynamics and health outcomes. She is a social demographer and earned a Ph.D. in Demography and Human Development & Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2013.
is a research analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute, based in Washington, DC. She works with projects related to gender, women’s empowerment, agriculture, health and nutrition issues, primarily through the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), Alive & Thrive, and the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Before joining IFPRI, Simone completed her master’s degree at Michigan State University in the department of Agriculture, Food and Resource Economics.
is currently a research analyst with the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition (PHN) department at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Prior to IFPRI, she completed her master’s degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, specializing in development economics and project evaluation. She is based at the IFPRI office in Washington, DC.
is a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Her areas of interest are development and labor economics, with specific focus on South Asia. Some examples of her work include studies of women's collectives in India and the role they play in improving rural agriculture and livelihoods, nutrition, and women's empowerment; evaluations of the impacts of several large nutrition and food security related social protection programs in Bangladesh, including on child growth and cognitive development; and secondary data work on food prices, market integration and the affordability of nutritious diets in India. Kalyani holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University, a Master’s in Quantitative Economics from the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India, and a B.A. in Economics from Delhi University, New Delhi, India.
is a senior research coordinator at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) based in Washington, DC. She coordinates research, training, and technical assistance on the implementation of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), including refinement and adaptations of the tools for project-level use, and for capturing empowerment across the value chain. She is co-Principal Investigator for the Gender, Agriculture & Assets Program (GAAP) (Phase 2), and leads the Methods Module for the CGIAR GENDER Platform. She manages and coordinates the integration of gender, equity, and empowerment into the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), and conducts research on gender, women’s empowerment, agriculture, health, and nutrition issues.
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