The importance of women’s roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women’s empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by the Government of Bangladesh. The project’s treatment arms included agricultural training, nutrition behavior change communication (BCC), and gender sensitization trainings to husbands and wives together – with these components combined additively, such that the impact of gender sensitization could be distinguished from that of agriculture and nutrition trainings. Empowerment was measured using the internationally-validated project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), and attitudes regarding gender roles were elicited from both men and women, to explore potentially gender-transformative impacts. Our study finds that ANGeL increased both women’s and men’s empowerment, raised the prevalence of households achieving gender parity, and led to small improvements in the gender attitudes of both women and men. We find significant increases in women’s empowerment scores and empowerment status from all treatment arms but with no significant differences across these. We find no evidence of unintended impacts on workloads and we note inconclusive evidence of possible increases in intimate partner violence (IPV). Our results also suggest some potential benefits of bundling nutrition and gender components with an agricultural development intervention; however, many of these benefits seem to be driven by bundling nutrition with agriculture. While we cannot assess the extent to which including men and women within the same treatment arms contributed to our results, it is plausible that the positive impacts of all treatment arms on women’s empowerment outcomes may have arisen from implementation modalities that provided information to both husbands and wives when they were together. The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.

Agricultural development projects increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but efforts to evaluate their impact have been stymied by the lack of comparable measures. Moreover, the context-specificity of empowerment implies that a quantitative measure alone will be inadequate to capture the nuances of the empowerment process. The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a portfolio of 13 agricultural development projects in nine countries in South Asia and Africa, developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and qualitative protocols for impact evaluations. Pro-WEAI covers three major types of agencies: instrumental, intrinsic, and collective. This paper synthesizes the results of 11 mixed-methods evaluations to assess these projects’ empowerment impacts. The projects implemented the pro-WEAI and its associated qualitative protocols in their impact evaluations. Our synthesis finds mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate indicators of women’s empowerment, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. There were more significant impacts on instrumental agency indicators and collective agency indicators, reflecting the group-based approaches used. We found few significant impacts on intrinsic agency indicators, except for those projects that intentionally addressed gender norms. Quantitative analysis does not show an association between the types of strategies that projects implemented and their impacts, except for capacity building strategies. This finding reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis, given the small number of projects involved. The qualitative studies provide more nuance and insight: some base level of empowerment and forms of agency may be necessary for women to participate in project activities, to benefit or further increase their empowerment. Our results highlight the need for projects to focus specifically on empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of both a common metric to compare empowerment impacts across projects and contexts and qualitative work to understand and contextualize these impacts.

A growing body of evidence indicates that agricultural development programs can potentially improve production diversity and diet quality of poor rural households; however, less is known about which aspects of program design are effective in diverse contexts and feasible to implement at scale. We address this issue through an evaluation of the Agriculture, Gender, and Nutrition Linkages (ANGeL) project. ANGeL is a randomized controlled trial testing what combination of trainings focused on agricultural production, nutrition behavior change communication, and gender sensitization were most effective in improving production diversity and diet quality among rural farm households in Bangladesh. We find that trainings focused on agriculture improved production diversity in terms of greater production of fruits and vegetables grown on the homestead, eggs, dairy, and fish; adding trainings on nutrition and gender did not significantly change these impacts. Trainings focused on both agriculture and nutrition showed the largest impacts on diet quality, with evidence indicating that households in this arm also significantly increased consumption out of homestead production for fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy, and fish. Findings indicate that agricultural training that promotes production of diverse, high-value, nutrient-rich foods can increase production diversity, and this can improve diet quality, but diet quality impacts are larger when agricultural training is combined with nutrition training. Relative to treatments combining agriculture and nutrition training, we find no significant impact of adding the gender sensitization on our measures of production diversity or diet quality.

There are few studies that rigorously assess how agricultural and nutrition related interventions enhance resilience and even fewer that incorporate a gendered dimension in their analysis. Mindful of this, we address three knowledge gaps: (1) Whether agricultural interventions aimed at diversifying income sources and improving nutrition have sustainable impacts (on asset bases, consumption, gender-specific outcomes and women’s empowerment, and on diets) that persist after the intervention ends; (2) whether such interventions are protective when shocks occur? and (3) whether these interventions promote gender-sensitive resilience. We answer these questions using unique data, a four-year post-endline follow up survey of households from a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a nutrition-and-gender-sensitive agricultural intervention in Bangladesh. We find that treatment arms that included both agriculture and nutrition training had sustainable effects on real per capita consumption, women’s empowerment (as measured by the pro-WEAI), and asset holdings measured four years after the original intervention ended. Treatment arms that included both agriculture and nutrition training (with or without gender sensitization) reduced the likelihood that households undertook more severe forms of coping strategies and reduced the likelihood that household per capita consumption fell, in real terms, by more than five percent between in the four years following the end of the intervention. The treatment arm that only provided training in agriculture had positive impacts at endline but these had largely faded away four years later. Our results suggest that bundling nutrition and agriculture training may contribute to resilience as well as to sustained impacts on consumption, women’s empowerment, and asset holdings in the medium term. These have implications for the design of future gender- and nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs.

The relationships between agricultural diversity, dietary diversity, and gender norms are complex and multi-dimensional. To better understand these links, and how to most effectively promote nutrition- and gender-sensitive agriculture in Bangladesh, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) designed the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. ANGeL aimed to identify actions and investments in agriculture that will help increase farm household income, improve nutrition, and empower women. Using rigorous research, namely, a randomized controlled trial design, IFPRI assessed impacts of the ANGeL project interventions on various outcomes. Over the 17-month implementation period, with no inputs provided to participating farm households besides knowledge from trainings, ANGeL generated useful lessons on strengthening the agriculture-nutrition-gender nexus in the country. Both men and women benefited from agricultural trainings, yet women learned more from the same trainings. Crop diversity increased substantially in homestead gardens, mainly due to ANGeL’s emphasis on homestead food production from nutritious crops. Farmers also adopted improved production practices. We consistently found that women were more likely to apply knowledge gained from agricultural production trainings to adopt various types of improved agriculture production practices, such as pest disease and control, seed production and care, and use of quality fertilizer. Similarly, improvements in nutrition knowledge were far greater for women and when trainings were combined. These improvements in knowledge had impacts on nutrition outcomes, with increases in household diet quality and child dietary diversity over the project period. The strongest improvements in empowerment came when agriculture, nutrition, and gender sensitization trainings were combined. ANGeL’s household approach empowered women and men in unique ways: while women became more empowered in asset ownership and income decisions, men became more empowered in production and income decisions in select interventions. Attitudes related to gender of both women and men also improved, with more women recognizing that they make important contributions to their communities. ANGeL is the first ministry-led initiative that uses a rigorous impact evaluation to develop an evidence base to design and implement a national program. The ANGeL project is a significant step towards filling critical knowledge and action gaps in the country on promoting nutrition-and gender-sensitive agriculture.

The status of women in agrifood systems report uses extensive new data and analyses to provide a comprehensive picture of women’s participation, benefits, and challenges they face working in agrifood systems globally. The report shows how increasing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agrifood systems enhances women’s well-being and the well-being of their households, creating opportunities for economic growth, greater incomes, productivity and resilience. The report comes more than a decade after the publication of the State of food and agriculture (SOFA) 2010–11: Women in agriculture – Closing the gender gap for development. SOFA 2010–11 documented the tremendous costs of gender inequality not only for women but also for agriculture and the broader economy and society, making the business case for closing existing gender gaps in accessing agricultural assets, inputs and services. Moving beyond agriculture, The status of women in agrifood systems reflects not only on how gender equality and women’s empowerment are central to the transition towards sustainable and resilient agrifood systems but also on how the transformation of agrifood systems can contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the available evidence on gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems that has been produced over the last decade. The report also provides policymakers and development actors with an extensive review of what has worked, highlighting the promise of moving from closing specific gender gaps towards the adoption of gender-transformative approaches that explicitly address the formal and informal structural constraints to equality. It concludes with specific recommendations on the way forward. Last update 03/08/2023

Understanding the types of food systems interventions that foster women’s empowerment and the types of women that are able to benefit from different interventions is important for development policy. SELEVER was a gender- and nutrition-sensitive poultry production intervention implemented in western Burkina Faso from 2017 to 2020 that aimed to empower women. We evaluated SELEVER using a mixed-methods cluster-randomized controlled trial, which included survey data from 1763 households at baseline and endline and a sub-sample for two interim lean season surveys. We used the multidimensional project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), which consists of 12 binary indicators, underlying count versions of 10 of these, an aggregate empowerment score (continuous) and a binary aggregate empowerment indicator, all for women and men. Women’s and men’s scores were compared to assess gender parity. We also assessed impacts on health and nutrition agency using the pro-WEAI health and nutrition module. We estimated program impact using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) models and examined whether there were differential impacts by flock size or among those who participated in program activities. Program impacts on empowerment and gender parity were null, despite the program’s careful approach to developing a gender-sensitive intervention. Meanwhile, results of the in-depth gender-focused qualitative work conducted near the project mid-point found there was greater awareness in the community of women’s time burden and their economic contributions, but it did not seem that awareness led to increased empowerment of women. We reflect on possible explanations for the null findings. One notable explanation may be the lack of a productive asset transfer, which have previously been shown to be essential, but not sufficient, for the empowerment of women in agricultural development programs. We consider these findings in light of current debates on asset transfers. Unfortunately, null impacts on women’s empowerment are not uncommon, and it is important to learn from such findings to strengthen future program design and delivery.