“Do policies to reduce rural poverty also reduce rural inequality? Should we care if the answer is ‘no’?” This was the key question Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University posed to frame the international conference Rural Inequalities: Evaluating Approaches to Overcome Disparities, hosted by the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) Independent Office of Evaluation May 2-3 in Rome.
More than 200 representatives from development agencies, academia, think tanks, the private sector, social movements, evaluation and policy institutions, and governments gathered to share ideas and figure out what combinations of information and approaches can best direct the benefits from agricultural development to the most vulnerable groups.
Policy makers have good reasons to worry about rural inequalities, participants agreed. After all, development is not neutral—it creates winners and losers, and there is “rising absolute inequality globally and within many countries,” Ravallion said.
“Too stark a divide between the haves and have-nots within a society is detrimental for everyone,” IFAD Vice President Cornelia Richter said, citing an IMF study showing that widening income inequalities can erode social cohesion, heighten political polarization and reduce overall economic growth. Other social inequalities may also hamper economic growth, Richter noted. For instance, addressing gender inequalities could unleash more of the currently untapped productive potential of women around the world.
Which inequalities—and dimensions of particular inequalities—should development organizations prioritize and how? Ravallion suggested that inequality needs to be “unpacked” because not all aspects are important in the same way everywhere. “Inequalities are multidimensional, multi-layered and cumulative,” said Oscar A. Garcia, director of IFAD’s Independent Office of Evaluation. “Understanding and acting actively upon inequalities requires looking beyond income disparities to capture their political, environmental, social, cultural and knowledge dimensions. Untangling such complexities is a challenge we must act on.”
A new Oxfam and LSE Inequality Framework offers one approach for unpacking these intersecting inequalities. Alex Prats of Oxfam Intermón explained how this multidimensional, adaptable approach could help identify the drivers of inequalities across different groups of people and guide priorities for interventions.
While development progress may look rosy at the country level, AidData’s Samantha Custer pointed out that health outcomes vary widely within countries, with hotspots of extreme vulnerability often falling under the radar. Tackling rural inequalities, in other words, requires closer engagement with the very individuals and communities development organizations are seeking to assist. For example, Eko Putro Sandjojo, Indonesia Minister of Villages, Development of Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration, described how his country’s new Village Fund Policy helped communities identify priority investments and build the infrastructure that they need to grow. Custer, meanwhile, proposed using hyperlocal data to pinpoint sources of vulnerability and channel resources to the groups most in need. These vulnerability maps can then be used to link resources to results by using spatially referenced inputs and outcomes to estimate the local impact of programs at the community level.
Perhaps the most ingrained and pervasive inequalities today are those between men and women. Gender gaps exist from the poorest communities in developing countries to the richest countries in the world. Dominique van de Walle of the World Bank argued that while poverty is an individual deprivation, targeting approaches often rely on household-level data, which does not reliably identify poor individuals and can completely miss disadvantaged groups within households, such as divorced and widowed women.
The Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project framework shows that it matters who within the household makes decisions and controls resources, and that joint control does not always mean equal control. Agricultural development projects that take this into account are more likely to see gender-equitable impacts. IFAD’s household methodologies offer a promising approach for encouraging cooperation between men and women within households and transforming gender norms. Cathy Rozel Farnworth described how the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) encourages men and women in farming households to create shared individual and family visions, and change together to achieve their goals. In addition to positive farm and livelihood outcomes, findings in Malawi confirm that GALS improved joint decision making within households, while findings in Uganda suggest impacts extend beyond individuals to the broader community.
Assessing the impacts of interventions on women’s empowerment also requires tools that measure empowerment at the individual level, such as the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Alessandra Garbero of IFAD discussed a streamlined adaptation of the WEAI, called the Reduced WEAI, which is a cost- and time-effective tool for measuring women’s empowerment for rural development projects. This is one of the earliest adaptations of the WEAI, and is a good example of how openness and data sharing across the development community can help accelerate progress in learning what works and what doesn’t.
What’s next for evaluators? “Countering inequalities also requires robust evidence and more granular data,” said Oscar A. Garcia of IFAD. He committed to make better use of disaggregated data at the local level where these are available, to enrich the analytical framework used by IFAD’s Independent Office of Evaluation, and to better understand the differentiated needs of IFAD’s target populations.
It’s important that projects of have an explicit theory of change, the World Bank’s Pablo Fajnzylber said, because it is naïve to expect that interventions will not interact with other factors. In his view, the development community needs to change its culture. Evaluators should encourage project managers to be candid when their efforts are not going well, so that they can adapt, change course and ultimately have better impacts. Masahiro Igarashi of FAO called for greater precision on what the term “rural inequalities” really means. Even the various terms people used throughout the conference do not mean the same thing, he said: Are we talking about injustice, power relationships, income or quality of life? If development researchers and professionals are going to evaluate inequalities, they need precise definitions. “We need to continue this conversation,” he said, “until we have a better understanding of what we should do.”
Hazel Malapit is a Senior Research Coordinator in IFPRI’s Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division. For more information on the conference including speaker bios and presentations, click here.
