Women’s empowerment is dynamic across the life course, affected not only by age but also by women’s social position within the household. In Nepal, high rates of male outmigration have further compounded household dynamics, although the impact on women’s empowerment is not clear. We use qualitative and quantitative data from Nepal to explore the relationship between women’s social location in the household, caste/ethnicity, husband’s migration status, and women’s empowerment. The study first examines the factors affecting overall empowerment as measured by the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI), followed by more detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of how each factor affects individual domains including asset ownership, access to and decisions on credit, control over use of income, group membership, input in productive decisions, and work load. We find that women’s empowerment is strongly associated with caste/ethnic identity and position in the household, but this dynamic interacts with husband’s migration status. Despite patriarchal norms of high caste groups, high caste women are more empowered than others, reflecting the disempowering effects of poverty and social exclusion for low caste and ethnic groups. Daughters-in-law in joint households are more likely to be empowered when their husbands are residents in the household and disempowered when their husbands are migrants, while wives in nuclear households are more likely to be empowered when their husbands are migrants. While qualitative findings indicate daughters-in-law are disempowered compared to their mothers-in-law, especially in time use, the quantitative results do not show significant differences, suggesting that we need to move toward an understanding of agency over time and intensity of work, rather than simply hours worked. Identifying the factors that contribute to disempowerment of women of different social positions has important implications for the design of interventions and programs that seek to improve women’s empowerment.

In this paper, we explore how different norms around property rights affect the empowerment of women of different social positions over the life cycle. We first review the conceptual foundations of property, empowerment, and intersectionality, and then present the methodology and empirical findings from ethnographic field work in Nepal. Going beyond formal ownership of property, we look at changes in property rights over personal and joint property at different stages of women’s lives. Finally, the paper makes recommendations for how research and development projects, especially in South Asia, can avoid misinterpreting asset and empowerment data by incorporating nuance around the concepts of property rights over the household life cycle

Using primary survey data collected in Tajikistan, Nepal and Senegal, three countries with high male outmigration rates, this study analyzes the impacts of migration on the empowerment of women who remain in rural areas. The study uses indicators from the Abbreviate Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) to measure women’s empowerment in five domains (decision-making autonomy around agricultural production, resources, control over income, group membership and workload) and instrumental variable approaches to address the endogeneity between the migration of a family member and women’s empowerment. It finds that male outmigration leads to women’s empowerment in agriculture in some domains and disempowerment in others. In Tajikistan, where women start with low levels of empowerment, women in households with a migrant are more likely to be involved in decisions in productive activities on the household farm, control income, own assets and achieve workload balance than women in non-migrant households. In Nepal and Senegal, women start at higher levels of empowerment and we see fewer differences in their empowerment based on whether they live in a migrant-sending household. The impacts of migration on empowerment depend on the context, whether the household receives remittances or owns land, and women’s position within the household.

Interest in the meaning and measurement of women’s empowerment has become a stated goal of many programs in international development. This paper explores a collaborative process of studying women’s empowerment in agricultural research for development using both quantitative and qualitative methods. It draws on three bodies of research around empowerment, growing interest in qualitative methods, and measurement research, especially the conceptualization and adaptations of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. Employing mixed methods over more than a decade of cooperation among researchers from the Global South and the Global North has challenged the methods and findings of each approach. The work has led to new insights about gender differences in what empowerment means to women and to men, the importance of context, interrelationships among dimensions of empowerment, and the need for greater precision in terms and measures, particularly around decision-making, asset ownership, and time use. Such collaborative research benefits from a long timeframe to build trust and shared understandings across disciplines. The paper concludes with suggestions for the next phase of research.

This book investigates the barriers to women’s economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality. Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women’s economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women’s care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such as the school-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy. With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.

We discuss the evolution of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) from its initial launch in 2018 until early 2023. We explain the reasons motivating changes to the composition of pro-WEAI and the adequacy thresholds of several indicators and discuss the implications of both for the overall measurement of project impacts on women’s empowerment. We present supporting empirical results comparing projects’ impacts calculated using the abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) (the predecessor to pro-WEAI with fewer indicators and less stringent indicator cut-offs), the pilot 12-indicator version of pro-WEAI, and the final, revised 10-indicator version of pro-WEAI, based on longitudinal data from six agricultural development projects in East and West Africa and South Asia as part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). In addition, we assess the sensitivity of the revised pro-WEAI to an alternative weighting scheme, namely inverse covariance weighting (ICW). Overall, we find that the revised pro-WEAI performs well: In comparison to A-WEAI, pro-WEAI—regardless of version—identifies larger and more frequently significant impact estimates, indicating that pro-WEAI is more sensitive to detecting project impacts on women’s empowerment than A-WEAI. And we find only minor differences in impact estimates produced using the 12-indicator, 10-indicator, or alternate weighting scheme versions of pro-WEAI. We conclude with reflections on six years of work on pro-WEAI during GAAP2.

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