Adapt, assess, progress: Integrating measures of women’s empowerment into rural development projects

A new tool based on IFPRI’s Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI)—developed by IFPRI and the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) Research and Impact Assessment Division (RIA)—provides a streamlined way to track and evaluate impacts on women’s empowerment in development projects.

The tool—the Integrated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (iWEAI)—was applied by IFPRI researchers in an impact evaluation of IFAD projects across six African countries.

The iWEAI was developed to meet a specific need in impact assessment. Development projects are increasingly using quantitative impact assessments to evaluate whether they are achieving their intended objectives. While such assessments have many benefits, they tend to focus on outcomes with standardized measures (e.g., yield, reach, income, nutritional indicators)—and overlook other important, yet harder to measure, outcomes like women’s empowerment.

Given its complexities as a social phenomenon, measuring women's empowerment presents serious challenges. Tools such as the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) have demonstrated agricultural development projects can do so, yet concerns about survey time and respondent burden have limited its widespread adoption.

Looking for a solution, IFAD partnered with IFPRI to explore a way to bridge IFAD’s commitment to reporting on women’s empowerment with IFPRI’s expertise in developing effective and non-cumbersome indicators for impact assessment.

IFAD aims to catalyze the generation, testing, and scaling up of solutions that have the potential to contribute to deliver equitable, inclusive, and greater impact for the rural poor by leveraging learning, strategic partnerships, digitalization, and implementation of suitable tools and guidelines. Through its commitment to pioneering the use of monitoring and evaluation approaches to measure causal impact with rigorous econometric methodologies (Monitoring and Evaluation for Impact or M&E4I), IFAD has much to offer the development community in terms of lessons on what works (or doesn’t work).

Monitoring activities and evaluating impact through a novel measure: iWEAI

RIA and IFPRI worked together from 2019-2021 to adapt RIA’s standard impact assessment survey. The iWEAI integrates 10 pro-WEAI indicators into RIA’s existing survey modules. It provides a streamlined approach to collect data on how IFAD’s projects are impacting rural farmers, especially regarding rural women's control over income, decision-making in their households, and other key empowerment metrics.

The iWEAI has many advantages. Developed by experts in gender, agriculture, and project monitoring, it reports on impacts such as women’s input into productive decisions within and outside the household and women’s work balance (i.e. time spent on paid and unpaid work). These data provide project managers information about what’s working—or not—to adapt their activities in order to deliver equitable outcomes for women.

Project impacts and opportunities

IFPRI applied the iWEAI as part of a multi-year, mixed-methods evaluation of six IFAD-led gender-sensitive rural development projects in Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and Djibouti.

Each project had a distinct focus and set of objectives, ranging from enhancing sustainable management of land, water, and other natural resources in Kenya to developing the fishing sector to provide better livelihood opportunities in Djibouti—while all projects embedded strategies to improve the livelihoods of women. For example, Mali and Djibouti projects targeted women’s groups, while the Ghana project trained young women in non-traditional occupations. In Kenya, the project incorporated IFAD’s gender transformative Gender Action Learning System to increase communication between household members.

The evaluation showed that all the projects achieved positive impact on several dimensions of women’s empowerment. Projects increased joint participation by women and men in decision-making in the main commodities’ agricultural value chains, and also beyond traditional agricultural activities. Room for improvement remains, depending on the project and country context.

The evaluation results will be brought to bear on IFAD’s 2024 cycle of project monitoring, supporting IFAD towards the goal of reaching 25% of gender transformative projects out of their overall portfolio.

A complementary tool

Pending further validation, the iWEAI can offer governments and international donors with budget and time constraints a way to incorporate women’s empowerment and gender parity measures into their data collection systems, gathering feedback to improve the design and implementation of future work towards poverty reduction and livelihoods improvement.

The iWEAI and other similar tools enhance tracking of global progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals agenda including SDG 5 (gender equality) and empowering women and youth as agents of change in their communities and countries.

Carlo Azzarri is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Innovation and Policy Scaling (IPS) Unit; Sedi-Anne Boukaka is an IPS Research Coordinator; Jessica Heckert is a Research Fellows with IFPRI's Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI) Unit; Ruth Meinzen Dick is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI's Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR) Unit; Greg Seymour is an NRR Research Fellow; Sara Savastano is the Director of IFAD’s Research and Impact Assessment Division. Opinions are the authors'.

This work was supported with funding from IFAD and co-financing from the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project Phase Two (GAAP2).