Quisumbing, Agnes R.

Malapit, Hazel J.

Rubin, Deborah

Heckert, Jessica

Seymour, Greg

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela

Doss, Cheryl

Johnson, Nancy

Thai, Giang

Ramani, Gayathri V.

Meyers, Emily

GAAP2 for pro-WEAI Study Team

Agricultural development projects increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but efforts to evaluate their impact have been stymied by the lack of comparable measures. Moreover, the context-specificity of empowerment implies that a quantitative measure alone will be inadequate to capture the nuances of the empowerment process. The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a portfolio of 13 agricultural development projects in nine countries in South Asia and Africa, developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and qualitative protocols for impact evaluations. Pro-WEAI covers three major types of agencies: instrumental, intrinsic, and collective. This paper synthesizes the results of 11 mixed-methods evaluations to assess these projects’ empowerment impacts. The projects implemented the pro-WEAI and its associated qualitative protocols in their impact evaluations. Our synthesis finds mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate indicators of women’s empowerment, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. There were more significant impacts on instrumental agency indicators and collective agency indicators, reflecting the group-based approaches used. We found few significant impacts on intrinsic agency indicators, except for those projects that intentionally addressed gender norms. Quantitative analysis does not show an association between the types of strategies that projects implemented and their impacts, except for capacity building strategies. This finding reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis, given the small number of projects involved. The qualitative studies provide more nuance and insight: some base level of empowerment and forms of agency may be necessary for women to participate in project activities, to benefit or further increase their empowerment. Our results highlight the need for projects to focus specifically on empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of both a common metric to compare empowerment impacts across projects and contexts and qualitative work to understand and contextualize these impacts.

Can agricultural development projects empower women? A synthesis of mixed methods evaluations using pro-WEAI in the gender, agriculture, and assets project (phase 2) portfolio

Breisinger, Clemens

ElDidi, Hagar

Karachiwalla, Naureen

Kassim, Yumna

Gilligan, Daniel

El-Enbaby, Hoda

Kurdi, Sikandra

Jilani, Amir Hamza

Egypt has been providing cash to poor households through its first conditional cash transfer program, Takaful and Karama, a social protection program run by the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MoSS), since March 2015. Takaful (“Solidarity”) supports poor families with children under 18, while Karama (“Dignity”) supports the elderly poor and people living with disabilities. The cash transfer program has enrolled 2.25 million families across all of Egypt’s governorates. The amount of the Takaful cash transfer provided to households depends on the number of children and their school level. The Karama program provides a set amount per individual. In order to reach the poorest households, participants are selected using a proxy means test. In the Takaful program, 89 percent of recipients are women, while only 11 percent are men. Beginning in 2018, Takaful will also begin implementing conditionalities, requiring households in the program to ensure their children attend school and participate in health screenings, added to antenatal care for pregnant women and post-natal care. The Takaful and Karama program was evaluated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) using both quantitative statistical methods (simple questions asked to many households during a survey) and qualitative methods (more in-depth questions asked to fewer households in longer interviews). The evaluation was designed to measure and explain the impacts of the cash transfers on household welfare, and to examine whether the program’s criteria for household selection were effective in identifying poor households. This brief, which focuses on the Takaful component of the program, summarizes the main findings from the evaluation and key recommendations.

Egypt’s Takaful and Karama cash transfer program: Evaluation of program impacts and recommendations

Thai, Giang

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