Women are key to agricultural transformation in developing countries, but various obstacles and economic constraints limit their contributions to their households and communities. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is an innovative tool that seeks to identify such obstacles, and may be used to track gender equality and measure empowerment, agency, and women’s inclusion in the agricultural sector. It measures the roles and extent of women’s engagement in agriculture across five domains of empowerment (listed below), and it may be used to compare women’s empowerment relative to men within the same household. The WEAI was designed to track change in women’s empowerment levels that occurs as a direct or indirect result of interventions under Feed the Future, the US government’s global hunger and food security initiative. It was developed in collaboration between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
The WEAI is composed of two sub-indices: one measures the five domains of empowerment for women, and the other measures gender parity in empowerment within the household. It is an aggregate index reported at the country or regional level that is based on individual-level data on men and women within the same households. The five domains included in the WEAI are:
- Production: Sole or joint decision-making over food and cash-crop farming, livestock, and fisheries as well as autonomy in agricultural production
- Resources: Ownership, access to, and decision-making power over productive resources such as land, livestock, agricultural equipment, consumer durables, and credit
- Income: Sole or joint control over income and expenditures
- Leadership: Membership in economic or social groups and comfort in speaking in public
- Time: Allocation of time to productive and domestic tasks and satisfaction with the available time for leisure activities
Since the WEAI’s release in 2012, different organizations have used or adapted the WEAI for use in about 50 countries (including the 19 Feed the Future focus countries) and counting! Since 2012, the WEAI has inspired the development of other versions of WEAI. The abbreviated WEAI (A-WEAI) was developed in 2014 to provide a shorter alternative to the WEAI survey instrument. Released in 2018, the project-level WEAI (Pro-WEAI) monitors changes in women’s empowerment at the project level, and includes optional modules relevant to livestock and/or nutrition and health projects. The pro-WEAI for market inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) seeks to measure women’s empowerment across multiple stages of agricultural value chains.
Finally, an optional survey module about health and nutrition was developed to complement pro-WEAI. This module includes additional questions to examine the impacts of agricultural development strategies that emphasize nutrition and health as pathways to empowerment. Contact us to access this module.