The event “Pro-WEAI: A New Tool for Measuring Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Development Projects” is a “soft launch” of the index and its associated nutrition module as a tool for measuring and assessing the impact of agricultural development projects on women’s empowerment in agriculture.

The project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) is a new survey-based index that builds on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), now adapted for project use and with a closer focus on aspects of empowerment related to health and nutrition.

The index is being developed by IFPRI’s Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a learning and capacity-building initiative supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).

The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) is working with 13 agricultural development projects in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to diagnose key areas of women’s disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment.

Representatives from different agricultural development projects, including the UN Joint Programme on Accelerating progress towards rural women’s economic empowerment (UN JP RWEE) – a global initiative jointly implemented by FAO, IFAD, UN Women and WFP – will share their experiences in piloting pro-WEAI as part of the GAAP2 portfolio and demonstrate how pro-WEAI supports knowledge management in projects. The event will also seek feedback from the broader donor community and policy makers about its usefulness in promoting women’s empowerment in agricultural projects and as part of national statistical surveys, and further discuss what policy implications can be derived from these analyses.