Since the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) launched in 2012, at least 247 organizations in 59 countries have used its various versions and tools for measuring women’s empowerment and gender equity. This uptake demonstrates a growing demand for validated tools focusing on these issues across geographic contexts and livelihoods.
A March 2 IFPRI policy seminar marked another expansion of the WEAI toolkit, launching new optional modules for the project-level WEAI (pro-WEAI). The new Health and Nutrition (pro-WEAI+HN) and Market Inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) modules are designed to measure domains of agency that are important for nutrition-sensitive and market-focused agricultural development projects.
Each module adds a new set of indicators: The pro-WEAI+HN module focuses on capturing women’s health and nutrition agency, while the pro-WEAI+MI module measures barriers to market access and inclusion for different value chain actors. Both include multiple individual indicators and are intended to be used in addition to core pro-WEAI. The development of these indicators was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the former CGIAR Research Programs on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) and Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).