This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) baseline survey results, summarizing both findings from the WEAI survey and the relationships between the WEAI and various outcomes of interest to the US Government’s Feed the Future initiative. These poverty, health, and nutrition outcomes include both factors that might affect empowerment and outcomes that might result from empowerment. The analysis includes thirteen countries from five regions and compares their baseline survey scores. WEAI scores range from a high of 0.98 in Cambodia to a low of 0.66 in Bangladesh.

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.

This third edition of Health at a Glance Asia/Pacific presents a set of key indicators of health status, the determinants of health, health care resources and utilisation, health care expenditure and financing and health care quality across 27 Asia/Pacific countries and economies.

Upon request of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted this study to support USAID in assessing the state of empowerment and gender parity of men and women along the agricultural value chain in the Feed the Future (FTF) Zone of Influence (ZOI) in Bangladesh. Specifically, IFPRI’s Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP), funded by USAID, piloted the modified Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) survey instruments in 10 upazilas (sub-districts) within the FTF ZOI across 1,200 households, which broadly belong to three economic activities of interest: (1) agricultural production, (2) agricultural entrepreneurship, and (3) agricultural sector employment. The quantitative survey was complemented by qualitative research to glean further insights into the facilitators and constraints of empowerment among various actors in the agricultural value chain. The data and analysis generated from this WEAI for Value Chain (WEAI4VC) study may inform USAID’s selection and design of interventions that may, in turn, maximize its programmatic impact on women and men’s empowerment as producers, entrepreneurs, and wage employees.

Gender-sensitive policy and programming have an integral role to play in fostering inclusive agricultural growth to meet the commitments of African countries to the Malabo Declaration goals. The 2019 Annual Trends and Outlook Report from ReSAKSS applies a gender lens to key issues that must be addressed to fully achieve these goals. Chapters examine the intersections between gender and (1) the context and institutions within which rural people operate; (2) the natural resources that men and women depend on for agriculture, sources of vulnerability, and resilience to shocks; (3) assets and income; and (4) livelihood strategies and well-being. The report serves as the official M&E report for the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), tracking progress on over 30 CAADP indicators.

Historically, agriculture has been crucial to Pakistan's economic growth and development and remains so even today. The sector employs almost half of the country's labor force, supplies key inputs to the country's manufacturing sector, generates a significant share of export earnings, and nourishes a rapidly growing population. Further, beyond agriculture is the wider rural economy, including nonfarm economic activities such as small enterprises, transport services, village retail shops, local schools, and clinics, all of which account for an estimated 40 to 57 percent of total rural household income. Given the importance of these rural activities, the slow growth of agriculture in recent years—averaging just 2.8 percent during the period 2010-2014—should be a source of concern for Pakistan. Can the country's agricultural sector and rural economy once again play a significant role in growth and development? Can it contribute to poverty reduction? Agriculture and the Rural Economy in Pakistan: Issues, Outlooks, and Policy Priorities seeks to answer these questions by examining the performance of both agriculture and the rural economy. The authors identify several measures that can promote agricultural productivity growth as well as wider economic and social development. These include increasing the efficiency of water use in the Indus river basin irrigation system, especially in the face of climate change; reforming policies and regulations that govern markets for agricultural inputs and commodities; and improving the provision of rural public services for health, education, women's empowerment, and community development. The analyses and conclusions in Agriculture and the Rural Economy in Pakistan will be of use to policy makers, development specialists, and others concerned with Pakistan's development. Contributors: Madiha Afzal, Nuzhat Ahmad, Faryal Ahmed, Mubarik Ali, Shujat Ali, Elena Briones Alonso, Hira Channa, Stephen Davies, Paul Dorosh, Gisselle Gajate Garrido, Arthur Gueneau, Madeeha Hameed, Brian Holtemeyer, Huma Khan, Katrina Kosec, Mehrab Malek, Sohail J. Malik, Shuaib Malik, Amina Mehmood, Dawit Mekonnen, Hina Nazli, Sara Rafi, Muhammad Ahsan Rana, Abdul Wajid Rana, Danielle Resnick, Khalid Riaz, Abdul Salam, Emily Schmidt, Asma Shahzad, David J. Spielman, James Thurlow, Ahmad Waqas, Edward Whitney, Fatima Zaidi.

This publication contains a number of essays and supplementary materials based on a two-day working meeting, held in Washington D.C. in March 2004 and organised jointly by the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development, to consider the relationships between power, rights and poverty reduction issues in theory and practice. Issues addressed include: competing definitions and concepts of power and rights, using experiences drawn from different countries; ways of helping development practitioners to apply these concepts to their work; a summary of the major theoretical conceptualisations of power and a literature review on power and rights.