TH2.2: Measuring empowerment across the value chain: The evolution of the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index for Market Inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI)

Abstract

Many development agencies design and implement interventions that aim to reach, benefit, and empower rural women across the value chain, ranging from production, to processing, to marketing. Determining whether and how such interventions empower women, as well as the constraints faced by different value chain actors, requires quantitative and qualitative tools. We describe how we adapted the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI), a mixed-methods tool for studying empowerment in development projects, to include aspects of agency relevant for multiple types of value chain actors. The resulting pro-WEAI for market inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) includes quantitative and qualitative instruments developed during four studies. Studies in Bangladesh (2017), Philippines (2017), and Malawi (2019) were intended to diagnose areas of disempowerment to inform programming, whereas the Benin (2019) study was an impact assessment of an agricultural training program. The pro-WEAI+MI includes the quantitative core pro-WEAI plus a dashboard of complementary indicators, along with recommended qualitative instruments. These tools investigate the empowerment of women in different value chains and nodes and identify barriers to market access and inclusion that may restrict empowerment for different value chain actors. Our findings highlight three lessons. First, the sampling strategy needs to be designed to capture the key actors in a value chain. Second, the market inclusion indicators cannot stand alone; they must be interpreted alongside the core pro-WEAI indicators. Third, not all market inclusion indicators will be relevant for all value chains. Users should rely on contextual knowledge to select which market inclusion indicators to prioritize.