Women’s empowerment is both intrinsically important and instrumental to achieving agricultural development goals such as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 2.3, which seeks to increase agricultural productivity among smallholders. In line with SDG 5’s focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment, many agricultural development projects now explicitly include women’s empowerment objectives.
But what are the optimal ways to challenge gender norms and foster women’s empowerment while increasing smallholder incomes? This remains an open question. Engaging with agricultural collectives—producer groups and farmer producer organizations (FPOs)—is one promising approach for addressing these challenges. As a result, understanding how agricultural collectives can improve women’s empowerment is a developing research area.
Interest in women’s participation in agricultural collectives has increased rapidly over the last decade for several reasons: Recognition that for smallholder farmers, aggregation is value addition, meaning collectives are a pathway to increased incomes; ability to realize economies of scale in implementation; and the potential to achieve sustainability through building or enhancing collective structures, among others.
To improve the evidence base and to benefit from cross-project and cross-context learning, four organizations working with agricultural collectives partnered with IFPRI under the Applying New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment (ANEW) portfolio, supported by a grant from Walmart Foundation. These include the Grameen Foundation and Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN) in India, TechnoServe in Guatemala, and Root Capital in Mexico.
Among their activities, ANEW projects worked with IFPRI to develop additional indicators for the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) for market inclusion (+MI) with a focus on collectives and higher-value, market-oriented crops. The pro-WEAI+MI is an optional add-on module to the pro-WEAI that is used to assess empowerment and barriers to market access and inclusion for different value chain actors.
An end-of-project workshop in Mexico City December 4-6, 2023 brought together representatives from the ANEW projects and other implementing organizations such as CIMMYT, CARE, and Catholic Relief Services that are using similar approaches and are interested in applying the pro-WEAI+MI. During the workshop, participants discussed lessons learned from the grant and brainstormed about future opportunities.
Common strategies to empower women in FPO-based interventions
Many FPO-based gender interventions focus on increasing women’s membership and leadership in FPOs and are often delivered primarily to FPO leaders. Gender strategies include shaping FPO policies to include more women, facilitating intrahousehold dialogues to challenge norms, gender-sensitization activities for collective leaders, gender equity advisory services for leaders, leadership trainings for women members and/or leaders, and gender awareness trainings for members and leaders.
Aside from specific empowerment strategies, women may also benefit from general strategies to strengthen FPO functioning such as developing linkages to financial, technological, and agricultural service providers for members; creating and strengthening access to markets, buyers, and infrastructure; and enhancing lending directly to services for cooperatives.
What’s different about FPOs?
The research on women’s empowerment in FPOs is relatively new compared to that on other group-based approaches such as women’s self-help groups (SHGs) or other microfinance-based groups. FPOs are not monolithic: There is a lot of variation in size, legal structure, governance, etc., depending on geography and livelihood. However, FPOs have some key differences from other agricultural groups in scale and scope of services. FPOs may have anywhere between 300 and 3000 members, allowing interventions at scale. FPOs can be men-only, mixed gender, or women-only. Women-only FPOs are rare in some contexts; in the four projects under the ANEW portfolio, only PRADAN supported women-only FPOs. Moreover, FPOs provide a range of market inclusion services to their members, while other groups are more likely to focus on one type of service (e.g., microcredit).
During the workshop, participants identified two key challenges with FPO-based interventions. First, implementing multiple interventions—agriculture, credit, gender—simultaneously runs the risk of overloading the platform. Second, the timeline and sequencing needed for effective interventions must be better understood. It may take multiple agricultural cycles to test and strengthen approaches and see changes in outcomes.
An additional complication comes from differences across cultural contexts, particularly for FPO umbrella organizations working in different geographies. Depending on the cultural context, women may not identify as farmers, despite engaging in farming activities (India) or may not be a household’s primary FPO member in a formal/legal sense (Latin America). Formal requirements of land ownership can further limit women’s ability to participate in FPOs, leading to their spouses being targeted instead. As with many interventions that aim to change the social norms surrounding gender, it is important to engage both women and men at the individual and collective levels.
Looking ahead
Workshop participants agreed that interventions can be strengthened and their impacts on women’s empowerment outcomes enhanced if integrated with gender-transformative approaches, such as Farmer Field Business Schools implemented by CARE, that focus on household dynamics and the community more broadly. Importantly, for these approaches to work, gender strategies should be embedded in the design phase of the project, not added as an afterthought.
Participants also acknowledged the potential tradeoff between economic performance and social inclusion. Programs that focus only on women’s empowerment may not immediately convey economic benefits, without which family members might oppose women’s participation in FPOs. In terms of sequencing, therefore, it might be necessary to first establish or strengthen FPO operations and only then layer on gender-sensitive or gender-transformative approaches.
Overall, more research is needed to establish the “right” sequence of business and gender-transformative elements in FPO-based interventions. Testing existing theories of change can help trace the pathways to impact and lead to a better understanding of how FPO-based approaches can enhance women’s empowerment. While the integration of gender-transformative approaches to complement the FPO-level approaches holds promise, we need to address the whole system to make such efforts sustainable.
Developing evidence
The workshop also focused on some of the challenges to developing evidence to identify FPO-based strategies that enhance women’s economic and social empowerment. In terms of study design, the FPO space is saturated in many contexts, and finding viable control groups is often difficult. Moreover, impacts on women’s empowerment take time to materialize.
One approach to strengthening evidence on effective strategies is to elaborate existing theories of change and test specific components to better understand intermediate steps and how they translate into longer-term goals. This approach can help trace the pathways to impact and strengthen our understanding of how FPO-based approaches can enhance women’s empowerment. At the same time, more flexible funding streams are needed to accommodate longer-term goals and accompanying research strategies.
The focus on using FPOs as a platform for enhancing women’s empowerment comes during a time when there is much enthusiasm for gender-transformative approaches. Yet until there is a stronger evidence base supporting the integration of gender-transformative approaches into FPO platforms, it may be difficult to garner widespread support from project funders. A related challenge is that these interventions tend to be bundled, making it difficult to attribute impacts to specific activities. Testing the relative value addition of gender transformative approaches is one area for future work.
Together, these points highlight the need to increase investments in research efforts to identify and strengthen promising approaches. Workshop participants emphasized the value of collaborative learning among project implementers and between implementers and researchers (e.g. in portfolio projects like ANEW) for synthesis and cross-project learning.
Note: This blog post is based on the end-of project workshop for the Applying New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment (ANEW) project. The ANEW project and the FPO-based interventions led by TechnoServe, the Grameen Foundation, PRADAN, and CIMMYT are supported by grants from the Walmart Foundation. The workshop included the following institutions and participants. IFPRI: Jessica Heckert, Emily Myers, Flor Paz, Agnes Quisumbing, Kalyani Raghunathan, and Soumyajit Ray. TechnoServe: Emma Fawcett and Luis Alvarado. Grameen Foundation: Bobbi Gray and Dev Raj Vardhan. PRADAN: Avijit Choudhury and Kuntalika Kumbhakar. CIMMYT: Luis Castillo Villaseñor, Alejandrina García Dávila, Natalia Odette Gutierrez Munoz, Gloria Martinez García, Angela Meentzen, Alejandro Ramírez López. CARE: Pranati Mohanraj. Catholic Relief Services: Marisol Amador.
