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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

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researcher spotlight

Samuel Benin

Samuel Benin is the Acting Director for Africa in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit. He conducts research on national strategies and public investment for accelerating food systems transformation in Africa and provides analytical support to the African Union’s CAADP Biennial Review.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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experts

Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion

Jessica Heckert

Research Fellow

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Bio

Jessica Heckert is a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit. She uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to address questions related to adolescent/youth well-being and work experiences, the impact of agricultural development interventions on women’s empowerment and other gender-related outcomes, and the intersection of household gender dynamics and health outcomes. In line with these research themes, she also works on the development of women’s empowerment metrics, including the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and affiliated tools, as well as the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS). She has conducted work in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Djibouti, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, and Tanzania. Jessica earned a PhD in Demography and Human Development and Family Studies from Pennsylvania State University in 2013.

Languages spoken: English, French, Haitian Creole, Spanish

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Publications

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Publications

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Working Paper

Measuring women’s empowerment in national surveys: Development of the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

2024
Seymour, Greg; Heckert, Jessica; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Malapit, Hazel J.; Paz, Florencia; Faas, Simone; Myers, Emily; Doss, Cheryl; Sinharoy, Sheela S.
…more Cheong, Yuk Fai; Yount, Kathryn M.; Hassan, Md. Zahidul; Hassan, Md. Imrul; Sharma, Sudhindra; Pokhrel, Pankaj; Sagastume, Mónica Dardón; Kanyanda, Shelton S. E.; Vundru, Wilbert D.; Moylan, Heather
Details

Measuring women’s empowerment in national surveys: Development of the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

Monitoring progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5—achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls—remains challenging unless we incorporate women’s empowerment metrics into nationally representative and multi-topic surveys. To address this data gap, we designed the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) as a streamlined empowerment module suitable for the 50×2030 Initiative, a global partnership that aims to build capacity and close the agricultural data gap in 50 countries by 2030, as well as other large multi-topic surveys. WEMNS measures women’s and men’s empowerment and is applicable to urban and rural areas and a variety of livelihood strategies (farming, self-employment, wage labor) across countries in different stages of structural transformation. WEMNS is a counting-based, multidimensional index composed of four domains: intrinsic agency, instrumental agency, collective agency, and agency-enabling resources. Each domain is measured with binary indicators derived from question sets in the WEMNS module. In this paper, we describe the development and testing of WEMNS and its components, including: (1) WEMNS’s distinctiveness from other empowerment metrics; (2) the iterative approach used to develop and pilot the WEMNS module in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi, and Nepal, using cognitive interviewing, phone surveys, and face-to-face surveys; (3) analysis of quantitative pilot data; and (4) a summary of the findings from the cognitive interviewing. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned and possibilities for further development of WEMNS and other empowerment metrics.

Year published

2024

Authors

Seymour, Greg; Heckert, Jessica; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Malapit, Hazel J.; Paz, Florencia; Faas, Simone; Myers, Emily; Doss, Cheryl; Sinharoy, Sheela S.; Cheong, Yuk Fai; Yount, Kathryn M.; Hassan, Md. Zahidul; Hassan, Md. Imrul; Sharma, Sudhindra; Pokhrel, Pankaj; Sagastume, Mónica Dardón; Kanyanda, Shelton S. E.; Vundru, Wilbert D.; Moylan, Heather

Citation

Seymour, Greg; Heckert, Jessica; Quisumbing, Agnes; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Malapit, Hazel; Paz, Florencia; Faas, Simone; Myers, Emily; et al. 2024. Measuring women’s empowerment in national surveys: Development of the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS). Discussion Paper 2254. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute

Keywords

Gender Equality; Women; Women’s Empowerment; Data; Agricultural Development; Livelihoods; Surveys

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Agriculture for Nutrition and Health

Record type

Working Paper

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Report

Engaging women in microfinance: A qualitative study of the Programme de Microfinance Rural in Mali

2024Margolies, Amy; Heckert, Jessica; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.
Details

Engaging women in microfinance: A qualitative study of the Programme de Microfinance Rural in Mali

The Programme de Microfinance Rural (PMR) was implemented in the rural, impoverished regions of Koulikoro, Kayes, Ségou, Sikasso and Mopti in Mali with support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). This paper shares the results of a qualitative study designed to improve understanding of the programme’s delivery and explore its impacts in terms of collective agency and efficacy, as well as the use of resources in households, with attention paid to the role of gender in addressing these issues. The findings suggest that the PMR actively engaged women and expanded access to loans through community-based credit groups. It also overcame negative community experiences with previous microfinance programmes to maintain a positive local reputation. In many cases, the PMR led to significant economic benefits for women but, in other cases, loan repayment terms posed a challenge. The collective agency of PMR credit groups built upon progress made by similar community groups in existence prior to the arrival of the PMR. The resources provided by the PMR strengthened these groups and helped enable them to expand their collective efficacy and ability to benefit the community more broadly. Women were most often the target loan recipients and frequently had a strong voice in the PMR groups, which were influential in the community. There is little evidence, however, that the PMR activities and credit group participation spilled over to strengthen either women’s political power in the community or their influence and empowerment in their own households. The paper concludes with specific recommendations for strengthening future iterations of the PMR or similar programmes.

Year published

2024

Authors

Margolies, Amy; Heckert, Jessica; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.

Citation

Margolies, Amy; Heckert, Jessica; and Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S. 2024. Engaging women in microfinance: a qualitative study of the Programme de Microfinance Rural in Mali. IFAD Research Series 94. Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development. https://www.ifad.org/en/web/knowledge/-/research-series-94

Country/Region

Mali

Keywords

Africa; Western Africa; Households; Women; Gender; Microfinance; Women’s Participation

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Report

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Brief

What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

2024Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani
Details

What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)-related challenges around the world can negatively affect communities and individuals, but people in resource-constrained areas face additional obstacles in preventing and recovering from the consequences of inadequate WASH infrastructure. WASH interventions in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) often target women as key actors for achieving project outcomes and many aim to improve the quality of women’s lives; fewer, however, have a specific focus on empowering women. A systematic review concluded that studies within the WASH sector have rarely focused specifically on empowering women, despite efforts to reach and benefit them (Caruso et al. 2022). In a review of gender-sensitive WASH indicators that have been used in the peer-reviewed literature, gray literature, and toolkits from organizations operating in WASH, only around 10% of the 162 indicators identified specifically measured empowerment. Given the limitations of previous approaches to measuring WASH-related empowerment, we recently developed a Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH), a suite of indicators to measure women’s and men’s agency in the WASH sector, based on data collected in Malawi and Nepal. This project note first provides some context for the Malawi study, then describes our overall approach to developing the WE-WASH indicators and summarizes the implementation of the WE-WASH question naire, and then presents some key findings emerging from Malawi.

Year published

2024

Authors

Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani

Citation

Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; and Raghunathan, Kalyani. 2024. What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH). IFPRI Project Note January 2024. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://hdl.handle.net/10568/138288

Country/Region

Malawi

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Southern Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Water; Hygiene; Infrastructure; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

Events

5th Global Food Security Conference
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

April 9 to 12, 2024

5th Global Food Security Conference

Conference: April 9-12, 2024 – 7:30 AM- 6:00 PM CET. Building on the momentum from the UN Food System Summit and recognizing that the 2030 target year of the Sustainable Development Goals is on the horizon, this 5th Global Food Security Conference will bring together science, business, and policy to address this need.

Introducing the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)
IFPRI Policy Seminar

 | 

February 22, 2024, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Introducing the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

Virtual Event: February 22, 2024 at 9:00am-10:30am EST. This event will present the WEMNS metric, review the development of the tool, and discuss its use to advance women’s empowerment. A panel of stakeholders from government and national statistical offices and from multilateral organizations will discuss the potential of WEMNS for promoting and monitoring women’s empowerment as part of national statistical surveys.

Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

September 20, 2023, 1:30 – 4:30 pm

Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

Hybrid Event: September 20, 2023 – 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM CEST. This event will present the WEMNS tool and discuss its use to further advance women’s empowerment.

News

July 11, 2023 | Press Release

Women key to crop success in low-income countries

This post is a slightly modified version of the original press release issued by the University of Edinburgh. Empowering women farmers in low and middle-income countries can lead to greater crop diversity helping to improve year-round supply of healthy foods, suggests a new article published in The Lancet Planetary Health by a group of authors including […]

July 11, 2023 | In the News

Editorial: Empower women to grow (The Lancet Planetary Health)

“Almost half of the world’s agricultural workers are women and women farmers produce up to 80% of the food grown in LMICs. Despite their large contribution to agricultural labor, fewer than 20% of landowners globally are women,” writes The Lancet Planetary Health in an editorial featuring a new article co-authored by IFPRI’s Lilia Bliznashka, Aulo Gelli, and […]

August 03, 2020 | In the News

The campaign #RuralWomen, Women with Rights begins (Diario Rotativo) 

Diario Rotativo (Mexico) published an article on the campaign to recognize rural women, on July 30 the campaign #RuralWomen, Women with Rights. Rural women,  breadwinners during the health crisis, have added to their productive activities, the care, and attention to children who do not go to school, a gigantic overload of unpaid work. IFPRI along with many NGOs and […]