scholarly journals Hitting the target and missing the point? On the risks of measuring women’s empowerment in agricultural development

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Tavenner ◽  
Todd A. Crane
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Agricultural Development ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Societal Relevance ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Scientific Accuracy ◽  
International Agricultural Development

AbstractThere is a strong impetus in international agricultural development to close ‘gender gaps’ in agricultural productivity. The goal of empowering women is often framed as the solution to closing these gaps, stimulating the proliferation of new indicators and instruments for the targeting, measurement, and tracking of programmatic goals in research for agricultural development. Despite these advances, current measurements and indices remain too simplified in terms of unit and scope of analysis, as well as being fundamentally flawed in how they aim to capture the relevance of ‘gender’ in diverse local contexts. We propose that the impulse to apply exogenously defined and weakly validated ‘women’s empowerment’ measures to diverse local contexts risks prioritizing practical expedience over scientific accuracy and societal relevance. Furthermore, the application of such measures risks creating the impression that programmatic “gender targets” are being achieved, while simultaneously undermining substantive gender transformative goals. The authors conclude that a different methodological approach grounded in participatory and qualitative methods is needed to create more meaningful metrics for assessing progress towards women’s empowerment.

scholarly journals Three essays on food security, agricultural productivity, and commodity basis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mohammad Hasan Mobarok
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Growing Season ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Scale Efficiency ◽  
Productivity Change ◽  
Efficiency Change ◽  
Rice Market

The proposed research is constructed around the theme of food security, agricultural productivity, and commodity basis. The first paper analyzes the impacts of COVID-19 on the Bangladesh rice market within the framework of a partial equilibrium regime-switching model. We provide an initial estimate of the short- and long-run effects of COVID-19 on the Bangladesh rice market and food security sustainability by comparing baseline projections. We analyze the effect of shocks in policies related to trade, public stock, and productivity on rice supply, demand, and food security dimensions. Finally, we assess the effectiveness of these policies to smooth out shocks that may arise from a future pandemic like COVID-19. In the second essay, we analyze the relationship between women's empowerment in agriculture and Bangladesh rice farm productivity change and its components, which include efficiency change, technological change, and scale efficiency change. We employ the non-parametric Malmquist approach and bootstrap regression method. We find that improvements in women's empowerment in agriculture, specifically enhancing their ability to make independent choices regarding agricultural production, have a statistically significant positive association with productivity change, efficiency change, and technical change. We also find that lowering the gender parity gap is positively related to improving the productivity of the sample farms. In the third essay, we analyze the effect of precipitation variations, namely local, growing season, and regional precipitation, on Missouri corn and soybean basis. We document statistically significant linear and nonlinear basis responses in corn and soybean models for local and growing season precipitation variations. We also find a statistically significant moderating effect of port distance measure on the curvilinearity of the association between regional precipitation and soybean basis. Keywords: food security; policy analysis; women's empowerment; Malmquist; imate change; precipitation

scholarly journals Women’s empowerment in agriculture and agricultural productivity: Evidence from rural maize farmer households in western Kenya

PLoS ONE ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. e0197995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gracious M. Diiro ◽  
Greg Seymour ◽  
Menale Kassie ◽  
Geoffrey Muricho ◽  
Beatrice Wambui Muriithi
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Western Kenya

Empowering Women Entrepreneurs Through Microfinance - A Case of Rural Bangladesh

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Saida Parvin
Keyword(s):  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Case Study Method ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
Donor Agencies ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact

Women’s empowerment has been at the centre of research focus for many decades. Extant literature examined the process, outcome and various challenges. Some claimed substantial success, while others contradicted with evidence of failure. But the success remains a matter of debate due to lack of empirical evidence of actual empowerment of women around the world. The current study aimed to address this gap by taking a case study method. The study critically evaluates 20 cases carefully sampled to include representatives from the entire country of Bangladesh. The study demonstrates popular beliefs about microfinance often misguide even the borrowers and they start living in a fabricated feeling of empowerment, facing real challenges to achieve true empowerment in their lives. The impact of this finding is twofold; firstly there is a theoretical contribution, where the definition of women’s empowerment is proposed to be revisited considering findings from these cases. And lastly, the policy makers at governmental and non-governmental organisations, and multinational donor agencies need to revise their assessment tools for funding.

Women’s Education May Be Even Better Than We Thought: Estimating the Gains from Education When Schooling Ain’t Learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Kaffenberger ◽  
Lant Pritchett
Keyword(s):  
Child Mortality ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Life Outcomes ◽  
Primary Schooling ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Financial Practices ◽  
Attenuation Bias

Women’s schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which both contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries, we show the association of women’s education (defined as schooling and the acquisition of literacy) with four life outcomes (fertility, child mortality, empowerment, and financial practices) is much larger than the standard estimates of the gains from schooling alone. First, estimates of the association of outcomes with schooling alone cannot distinguish between the association of outcomes with schooling that actually produces increased learning and schooling that does not. Second, typical estimates do not address attenuation bias from measurement error. Using the new data on literacy to partially address these deficiencies, we find that the associations of women’s basic education (completing primary schooling and attaining literacy) with child mortality, fertility, women’s empowerment and the associations of men’s and women’s basic education with positive financial practices are three to five times larger than standard estimates. For instance, our country aggregated OLS estimate of the association of women’s empowerment with primary schooling versus no schooling is 0.15 of a standard deviation of the index, but the estimated association for women with primary schooling and literacy, using IV to correct for attenuation bias, is 0.68, 4.6 times bigger. Our findings raise two conceptual points. First, if the causal pathway through which schooling affects life outcomes is, even partially, through learning then estimates of the impact of schooling will underestimate the impact of education. Second, decisions about how to invest to improve life outcomes necessarily depend on estimates of the relative impacts and relative costs of schooling (e.g., grade completion) versus learning (e.g., literacy) on life outcomes. Our results do share the limitation of all previous observational results that the associations cannot be given causal interpretation and much more work will be needed to be able to make reliable claims about causal pathways.

Women's Empowerment in Latin American Cities and Its Influence on Mortality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Ortigoza ◽  
Ariela Braverman ◽  
Philipp Hessel ◽  
Vanessa Di Cecco ◽  
Amélia Augusta Friche ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
American Cities
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