Quisumbing Agnes R, Meinzen-Dick Ruth, Malapit Hazel J, Seymour Greg, Heckert Jessica, Doss Cheryl, Johnson Nancy, Rubin Deborah, Thai Giang, Ramani Gayathri, Myers Emily
International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, USA.
Tufts University, Medford MA, USA.
J Rural Stud. 2024 May;108:103295. doi: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2024.103295.
Development interventions increasingly include women's empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but evaluating their impact has been stymied by the lack of measures that are comparable across interventions. This paper synthesizes the findings of 11 mixed-methods impact evaluations of agricultural development projects from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that were part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). As part of GAAP2, qualitative and quantitative data were used to develop and validate the multidimensional project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), which was used to assess the impact of GAAP2 projects on women's empowerment. This paper assesses the extent to which: (1) a two- to three-year agricultural development project can contribute to women's empowerment; and (2) a suite of methods comprising a standardized quantitative measure of women's empowerment and a set of qualitative protocols, can evaluate such impacts. Our synthesis finds that the most common positive significant impacts were on the instrumental and collective agency indicators that comprise pro-WEAI, owing to the group-based approaches used. We found few projects significantly improved intrinsic agency, even among those with explicitly stated objectives to change gender norms. Unsurprisingly, we find mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate pro-WEAI, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. Our results highlight the need for projects to design their strategies specifically for empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of a suite of methods containing a common metric to compare empowerment impacts and qualitative protocols to understand and contextualize these impacts.
发展干预措施越来越多地将妇女赋权和性别平等纳入其目标之中，但由于缺乏可在不同干预措施之间进行比较的衡量标准，对其影响的评估一直受到阻碍。本文综合了南亚和撒哈拉以南非洲地区11个农业发展项目的混合方法影响评估结果，这些项目是性别、农业与资产项目第二阶段（GAAP2）的一部分。作为GAAP2的一部分，定性和定量数据被用于开发和验证多维项目层面的农业领域妇女赋权指数（pro-WEAI），该指数用于评估GAAP2项目对妇女赋权的影响。本文评估了以下两个方面的程度：（1）一个为期两到三年的农业发展项目能够在多大程度上促进妇女赋权；（2）一套包括妇女赋权标准化定量衡量方法和一系列定性方案的方法，能否评估此类影响。我们的综合研究发现，由于采用了基于群体的方法，最常见的积极显著影响体现在构成pro-WEAI的工具性和集体能动性指标上。我们发现，即使在那些明确表示目标是改变性别规范的项目中，也很少有项目能显著改善内在能动性。不出所料，我们发现对总体pro-WEAI的影响好坏参半，且大多为零影响，在南亚案例中产生积极影响的可能性高于非洲案例。我们的研究结果凸显了项目需要专门为赋权设计战略，而不是假定旨在惠及妇女的项目会自动赋予她们权力。我们的研究还表明了一套方法的价值，这套方法包含一个用于比较赋权影响的通用指标以及用于理解和阐释这些影响的定性方案。
