The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index

By S. Alkire, Ruth S. Meinzen-Dick, Amber Peterman, A. Quisumbing, Greg Seymour, Ana Vaz. 2013

1,214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) measures the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector and comprises two subindexes. The first assesses empowerment of women in five domains, including (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) control of use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time allocation. The second subindex measures the percentage of women whose achievements are at least as high as men in their households and, for women lacking parity, the relative empowerment gap with respect to the male in their household. This article documents the development of the WEAI and presents pilot findings from Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Uganda.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d5c9e13ac5c0b256d27a7f3f895356c326150f2

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Citations in the corpus

Bridging the financial inclusion gender gap in smallholder agriculture in Nigeria: An untapped potential for sustainable development (2020, background): “Although previous studies had investigated the role of FI in achieving the SDGs (Klapper et al. 2016); the position of gender equality in sustainable development (UN, 2014; World Bank, 2012; Agarwal 2012) and the need to close gender disparity in agriculture (Huyer, 2016;Alkire et al. 2013).”
What does it Mean to Make a ‘Joint’ Decision? Unpacking Intra-household Decision Making in Agriculture: Implications for Policy and Practice (2020, background): “For example, the WEAI aggregates joint and sole decisionmaking without further differentiation (Alkire et al., 2013, p. 73), while other studies prioritise sole over joint decision-making (see, for example, de Brauw, Gilligan, Hoddinott, & Roy, 2014).”
What dimensions of women's empowerment in agriculture matter for nutrition in Ghana? (2015, methodology): “Initially designed as a monitoring and evaluation tool for Feed the Future, the index can also be used to assess the general state of empowerment and gender parity in agriculture and identify the key areas where empowerment gaps exist (Alkire et al., 2013).”
Gender, assets, and market-oriented agriculture: learning from high-value crop and livestock projects in Africa and Asia (2015, methodology): “This suggests that a multidimensional indicator, similar to the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) (Alkire et al. 2013) that is being used in the US Feed the Future Initiative, may be useful to a wide range of agricultural development projects.”
Women’s Empowerment Mitigates the Negative Effects of Low Production Diversity on Maternal and Child Nutrition in Nepal (2015, methodology): “By construction, the workload indicator enters the WEAI negatively; a woman who is overburdened by paid and unpaid work is considered to be disempowered (Alkire et al., 2013).”
Transfers, Behavior Change Communication, and Intimate Partner Violence: Postprogram Evidence from Rural Bangladesh (2019, background): “Group membership among women is low (Alkire et al., 2013), which, combined with seclusion norms, limits social contact.”
Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture: What Role for Food Security in Bangladesh? (2014, neutral): “Source: Alkire et al. (2013). and women within the same households.”
Measuring women’s decisionmaking: Indicator choice and survey design experiments from cash and food transfer evaluations in Ecuador, Uganda and Yemen (2015, methodology): “The approach of increasing the specificity of domains is taken by the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, which asks questions specific to agricultural production, such as about decisions on crop choice and sale of crops, to understand specific domains that agricultural interventions may affec”