Programming to address gender disparities in agricultural production has grown significantly over the past quarter century since Kabeer (1999) defined women’s empowerment and called for greater support for women to gain agency over their lives. Important questions remain about the “how” of supporting women to engage with market systems and to use their earnings and skills to empower themselves by strengthening their abilities to make strategic decisions and act on them.
A key question in such efforts is how women’s empowerment projects are conceptualized by the organizations behind them. To address this question, an organizational study was conducted under the IFPRI-led Applying New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment (ANEW) project portfolio, focusing on agricultural collectives. The study’s aim was to better understand the organizational strategies that guide project development and how those envisioned strengthening women’s empowerment through engagement with agricultural markets.
In the study, implementing organizations including partners Grameen, PRADAN, Root Capital, and TechnoServe, and the funder, the Walmart Foundation, were the research subjects, rather than the participating farmers or farmer-producer organizations (FPOs).
To identify how women’s empowerment is conceptualized within those organizations, research included examining their documents and policies, and conducting interviews with selected staff members. This work was inspired by IFPRI research investigating whether there were links between project strategies and project results, a study that led to the “Reach, Benefit, Empower, Transform” (RBET) framework.
The study found that implementing organizations each had policies to guide their approaches to women’s empowerment yet focused on economic rather than social dimensions. Some organizations have written, detailed policies, requiring all projects to conduct gender analyses early in design or implementation, providing both toolkits and metrics for their own staff and the groups they work with. Others were more “organic” in approach with fewer requirements and employing varied approaches across projects. Another variation was in the organizations’ emphasis on enterprise development and entrepreneurship for women. Implementing organizations expressed a need for more guidance on how to achieve economic and social empowerment.
The Walmart Foundation supports training and increased market access for women farmers and entrepreneurs through multiple pathways and using diverse strategies, but a central goal has been to increase income and economic benefits for women across grantees programs. More evidence is needed to help develop ways to assess and promote social empowerment gains.
ANEW project aims: Measuring women’s empowerment in agricultural collectives
The ANEW portfolio of projects—two in India and one each in Mexico and Guatemala—all worked through collectives, specifically FPOs and cooperatives, to facilitate women’s engagement in market systems. The ANEW project objectives included:
- Developing new women’s empowerment metrics that build on the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index for Market Inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) and meet the needs of market inclusion interventions that use collectives.
- Generating evidence on what works to empower women in these contexts.
- Increasing the monitoring, evaluation, and learning capacities of partner projects to collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from pro-WEAI+MI and WEAI Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) tools (portfolio and beyond).
Each project within the ANEW portfolio conducted both quantitative surveys and qualitative studies. IFPRI was the evaluation partner and designed and oversaw the data collection activities for PRADAN and TechnoServe, while Grameen and Root Capital managed those activities themselves.
Examining organization strategies to empower women
The four organizations have gender policies in place, although these vary in their levels of detail, whether they include both the project participants as well as staff, and the extent to which they are shared publicly. All use the term “women’s empowerment” in describing elements of their approaches.
Operating in India, PRADAN and Grameen have worked with women since inception. Alongside efforts to strengthen household livelihoods through improving food security and income generation, they have supported trainings and activities to directly promote household-level shifts in gender relations.
Recently PRADAN has expanded its work with women’s self-help groups to work with FPOs to strengthen producers’ links to markets. In its Livelihood Enhancement through market Access and women emPowerment (LEAP) program in West Bengal, Odisha, and Jharkhand in eastern India, the project in the ANEW portfolio, PRADAN has provided gender sensitization activities and other trainings for FPO leaders to help them to build member empowerment, collective action, and change in gender relations. PRADAN has also worked to improve support for its own women employees.
Grameen, in its Market Access eNabled by Digital Innovation (MANDI) project in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India, has supported intrahousehold dialogues among FPO members to address discriminatory social norms and to explore issues related to the division of labor and control over resources.
These two projects explicitly seek to address both social and economic benefits of gender equity at the household level in their work through collectives. Grameen has developed a toolkit that offers step-by-step facilitation for crafting project-level scopes of work that set targets and approaches for building gender equity in programs, projects, and among implementing partners.
Operating in Latin America, both TechnoServe and Root Capital have made forming and strengthening agricultural enterprises a central program focus since their formation. Their support for women as producers and agribusiness entrepreneurs has grown over the last decade, but both organizations work with a larger proportion of men than women as cooperative members and leaders, and as buyers. For TechnoServe, the proportion of women beneficiaries had reached 42% by the end of 2023, and they aim to increase that figure to 50% by 2026.
In its Smallholder Market Access Program in Central America (SMA), TechnoServe provides agricultural trainings to both men and women farmers to improve crop yields and crop quality to achieve higher incomes from the market. It also provides training on women’s leadership to strengthen the low participation and leadership rates of women in FPOs. A central goal of its organizational gender policy is to increase the numbers and quality of engagement of women at different nodes of the market system.
Root Capital provides trainings on various agribusiness topics to cooperative leaders. It rolled out several initiatives in its Women in Agriculture Initiative (WAI) since 2012, including gender-oriented grants and advisory services aimed at encouraging its clients to conduct internal diagnostics and develop targeted action plans to identify and address gender disparities.
What gaps remain?
In the ANEW portfolio, there is great emphasis on women’s economic empowerment rather than on the broader social dimensions of women’s empowerment. Strengthening decision-making over economic resources is a critical aspect of women’s empowerment and a key metric in the pro-WEAI+MI. However, at the organizational level, theories of change do not demonstrate evidence-based pathways that draw either on their own projects or on other research, to show the specific steps through which women’s increased income and/or assets can achieve broader changes in social norms and non-economic dimensions of empowerment. While evidence on these key pathways is improving, measuring economic outcomes is still easier. Despite increasing investments in new tools for measuring women’s empowerment, there are still significant gaps in understanding both economic and non-economic drivers of women’s empowerment (Priya, Venkatesh, and Shukla 2021:8) Additional research could also help determine whether organizational approaches are correlated with empowerment results. Organizations need first to acknowledge a difference between women’s economic empowerment and the other dimensions of empowerment, and then to consider how their programs can more explicitly be designed to achieve both goals.
Deborah Rubin is a Director of Cultural Practice, LLC. This study is based on research that is not yet peer reviewed. Opinions are the authors’.
This work was supported by the Walmart Foundation.
Referenced Discussion Paper:
Rubin, Deborah. 2024. Understanding the organizational approaches of funders and project implementers to strengthen women’s empowerment through agricultural collectives. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2283. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/155195
