Monitoring progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5—achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls—remains challenging unless we incorporate women’s empowerment metrics into nationally representative and multi-topic surveys. To address this data gap, we designed the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) as a streamlined empowerment module suitable for the 50x2030 Initiative, a global partnership that aims to build capacity and close the agricultural data gap in 50 countries by 2030, as well as other large multi-topic surveys. WEMNS measures women’s and men’s empowerment and is applicable to urban and rural areas and a variety of livelihood strategies (farming, self-employment, wage labor) across countries in different stages of structural transformation. WEMNS is a counting-based, multidimensional index composed of four domains: intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, collective agency, and agency-enabling resources. Each domain is measured with binary indicators derived from question sets in the WEMNS module. In this paper, we describe the development and testing of WEMNS and its components, including: (1) WEMNS's distinctiveness from other empowerment metrics; (2) the iterative approach used to develop and pilot the WEMNS module in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi, and Nepal, using cognitive interviewing, phone surveys, and face-to-face surveys; (3) analysis of quantitative pilot data; and (4) a summary of the findings from the cognitive interviewing. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned and possibilities for further development of WEMNS and other empowerment metrics.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 aims to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” and gender-specific aspects are embedded in several other SDGs. However, routine national data collection to produce gender data for SDG monitoring and other purposes is limited. Within the Women's Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) project, our objective was to develop, test, and refine a succinct survey instrument for use by national statistical offices and survey practitioners in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to measure women's and men's empowerment. We followed a multi-phased approach to identify empowerment constructs for measurement; develop, test, and refine a WEMNS survey module; collect data through two waves of phone surveys with women and men in Bangladesh (N=1807), Malawi (N=1,657), and Nepal (N=2,461); and conduct exploratory, confirmatory, and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicate that the WEMNS item sets have clear factor structures, which align with theoretical dimensions of empowerment. Tests of measurement invariance indicate that configural invariance is common across the item sets, suggesting that items are capturing common constructs of empowerment. However, few item sets achieve scalar invariance, indicating that the remaining item sets may not measure the underlying empowerment constructs in equivalent ways across gender (women and men), country setting, and/or time (survey wave). Based on the findings, some constructs of women's empowerment measured here may be suitable for phone survey modalities, but other constructs require further development and testing to be suitable for this modality of data collection. The results have implications for the cross-gender, cross-country, and cross-time comparability of data that are being used to monitor aspects of empowerment embedded in the SDGs. Future phases of WEMNS will assess the measurement properties of a revised module as implemented in face-to-face, rather than phone-based, surveys in the same three country settings.

Women’s empowerment is of paramount importance for multiple development goals. However, it is much easier to discuss the importance of empowerment than it is to define the methods and tools needed to measure it. This requires research focused on the conceptual understanding of how we should measure women’s empowerment, in a variety of facets, and the creation of tools and methods for doing so.

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.

Resilient food systems. Zoonoses transmission. Food safety in fresh-food markets. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, phrases that had most often been found in research papers suddenly emerged on the front pages of newspapers and in trending topics on social media. Countries, corporations, and consumers alike struggled to understand not only how to cope with the threat of the disease itself, but also with meeting basic needs, such as food security, nutrition, and health, as lockdowns and mobility restrictions reshaped the world in very unequal ways, seemingly overnight. As a consortium working across five flagship research areas to address some of the world’s greatest challenges in nutrition and health, the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) was uniquely prepared to support policymakers and partners in low- and middle-income countries in their COVID-19 response and recovery efforts and to contribute research evidence on ways to build back better toward a more equitable, food secure, and sustainable future.

Women’s equal participation and leadership in political and public life can boost a country’s long-run economic growth, foster social inclusion, and help countries reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Beyond these important outcomes, women’s inclusion in public life is a basic human right: women deserve a role in making decisions, controlling resources, and shaping policies. Despite the importance of women’s voices and their empowerment in policy and decision-making processes, it is far easier to lament their absence than to define and measure them. We know that political empowerment, measured in terms of the share of women in government ministries and parliament, is low and is the weakest dimension in the Global Gender Gap. Yet such national statistics, while important and informative, risk mismeasuring women’s participation and influence in public life and do not give policymakers and advocacy organizations traction on specific gaps and opportunities for increasing women’s voice in policymaking. With this situation in mind and focusing on agrifood systems, which are crucial for delivering the SDGs, we developed an assessment framework—Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov)— to assess women’s voice and empowerment in national policy processes in agrifood systems. This paper presents the first pilot-testing of WEAGov in Nigeria. In this paper, we present how the WEAGov tool works in the Nigerian context, analyze the data, and provide diagnostic on the status of women’s voice and empowerment in the agrifood policy process. As discussed in this paper, the pilot-testing in Nigeria provides useful lessons toward improving the measurement for future use and provides valuable policy insights on critical entry points for increasing women’s voice and empowerment in the national agrifood policy process.

This Open Access book explores the multifaceted nature of agricultural and rural development in Asia and examines the extent to which the Asian experience is being replicated in contemporary Africa. This volume compiles the works of top scholars who provided analyses and evidences from household-level surveys collected for many years in several parts of Asia and Africa. The most important finding presented in this book is that African agricultural development has evolved following the pathways of Asian agricultural development. The common pathways are borrowed technology from abroad and adaptive research in rice farming; secured property rights on natural resources; adoption of ICTs; investments in human capital, including training; and launching of the high-value agriculture. In both continents, agricultural development started in the crop sector, which had a strong tendency to induce the dynamic development of other sectors in rural areas. [Resumen de la editorial]