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.

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.

Migration not only contributes to development through financial remittances, but also through flows of knowledge and through the diffusion of social, cultural and political norms and values. In fact, these more intangible contributions are more appreciated during economic and financial crises, as financial remittances become unstable or decrease in those circumstances. This paper, therefore, addresses the effect of migration on women's empowerment in Turkey. The number of women in parliament in Turkey is chosen as a gauge of women's empowerment and is explained by the emigration rate, the relative education of women to men, and a measure of democracy. Utilization of data over six decades from 1960 until 2011 gives the possibility that these series can be spuriously correlated. Therefore, the paper addresses the issue of spurious correlation in an analytical way. Spurious correlation is the risk of linking the share of women in parliament, for example, to the emigration rate when in fact there is no association. This study adopts the bounds testing procedure as a method to determine and to avoid spurious correlation. The results of bounds testing gives clear-cut evidence that women's empowerment, the share of women in parliament in the present context, is related to the emigration rate, the relative education of women and to a measure of democracy. The bounds-testing procedure is replicated for emigration flows by destination country groups such as European and other core OECD countries, Arab countries, and Russia and CIS (Commonwealth Independent States) countries. Again, it is found that the share of women in parliament is related to the country groups with the largest effect in European and core OECD countries. The results are robust for the inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees in the emigration data. These results have important policy implications for sending as well as for destination countries, implications which are discussed in the paper.

Migration of population has been a recurrent phenomenon since the dawn of human history. Though its form has changed but remains as very dominant phenomenon in the global social system. In modern days also people migrate from underdeveloped areas to the developed ones in search of better employment and opportunity. There are far reaching consequences of migration of male labor force on their place of origin. Keeping in view the anticipated consequences of migration in place of origin, this study has been undertaken to examine the impact of male labor out-migration on rice productivity, livelihood and women empowerment on migrant household in Bihar. The empirical analysis is based on a survey of 400 households (200 migrants and 200 non-migrants) from eight villages in Madhubani and East Champaran districts of Bihar. Migrant households and matching sample of non-migrant households were selected to undertake a comparative analysis of differences in agricultural productivity parameters and women empowerment level. It was observed that the efficiencies of human labor and irrigation in rice production were higher than non-migrant households and statistically significant, indicating rational use of these two critical inputs on migrant households in Bihar. This observation leads to the conclusion that the migration might have helped in judicious use of human labor at native place due to migration of surplus labor force for gainful employment to destination of migration. Remittances have been utilized for meeting consumption needs, improved livelihood, better education to children and better health care facilities which help in overall improvement in livelihood on migrant households in Bihar. Migrant households also preferred to save money to meet their requirements in unforeseen situations. Hence, migration can be said to be one of risk-coping strategies for the weaker sections of the society and helped developing the saving habits among migrant households. The allocation of remittances on agricultural inputs could have increased if proper infrastructure facilities were present in rural areas for faster dissemination of modern agricultural technology for increasing agricultural production. Level of women employment has increased on migrant households, particularly on poor households; however, work load of women has also increased. It has been observed that role of women of migrant households changed from unpaid female labor to managers of the household, however, they face problem in management of fund, technology and input-output marketing. There is a need to launch a programme for their training to improve their knowledge in financial, technological and marketing management.

Society's greatest use of water is in food production; a fact that puts farmers centre stage in global environmental management. Current management of food value chains, however, is not well set up to enable farmers to undertake their dual role of feeding a growing population and stewarding natural resources. The book considers the interconnected issues of real water in the environment and "virtual water" in food value chains and investigates how society influences both fields. This perspective draws out considerable challenges for food security and for environmental stewardship in the context of ongoing global change. The book discusses these issues by region and with global overviews of selected commodities. Innovation relevant to the kind of change needed for the current food system to meet future challenges is reviewed in light of the findings of the regional and thematic analysis.

Although women’s empowerment and gender equality are associated with better maternal and child nutrition outcomes, recent systematic reviews find inconclusive evidence. This paper applies a comparable methodology to data on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), a recent internationally-validated measure based on interviews of women and men within the same household, from six countries in Africa and Asia to identify which dimensions of women’s empowerment are related to household-, women-, and child-level dietary and nutrition outcomes. We examine the relationship between women’s empowerment and household-level food security and dietary diversity; women’s dietary diversity and BMI; and child-related outcomes, controlling for woman, child, and household characteristics. We also test whether women’s empowerment has differential associations for boys and girls. We do not find consistent associations between dimensions of empowerment and food security and nutrition outcomes across countries, but some patterns emerge. Overall empowerment scores are more strongly associated with nutritional outcomes in the South Asian countries in our sample compared to the African ones. Where significant, greater intrahousehold gender equality is associated with better nutritional outcomes. However, different domains have different associations with nutritional outcomes, suggesting that tradeoffs exist: higher workloads are associated with more diverse diets but lower women’s BMI and child anthropometric outcomes. Identifying the overlap between the top contributors to disempowerment and those most strongly related to nutrition outcomes can inform the design and implementation of nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs.