What women own in the household matters. If disparities between women and men begin with the family’s assets, a shock from disasters like extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic can complicate the challenge for programs seeking to empower women.

In Bangladesh, MRR Innovation Lab principal investigator Agnes Quisumbing is testing whether the benefits of a program that increased women’s empowerment and improved other outcomes were sustained after both a cyclone and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Q&A, she discusses how shocks affect women, how development programming can increase women’s empowerment and what women in rural communities need to improve their lives.

Agnes Quisumbing, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), has spent her career studying gender and economic mobility in rural communities in Africa and South Asia and helped develop the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI).

 

How do weather-related shocks and other kinds of disasters affect women and men differently?

This is a topic that we’ve done research on for a long time but until recently never had a chance to address in an experimental setting. After the food price crisis in 2007 and 2008, we tried to look at how that shock affected the assets that men and women held solely and jointly in Bangladesh and Uganda.

In that observational study, assets that were very important to the households’ livelihoods, like land, were owned by men. Smaller assets that were owned by women, like jewelry and livestock, were most often disposed of as a way to cope with the shock. We wondered if, over the long run, the disposal of women’s assets would lead to a reduction in their bargaining power in the household.

We later evaluated the impacts of the ANGeL project, which was designed to promote agricultural diversity, increase farm household income, improve nutrition and empower women. ANGeL increased women’s empowerment across the board. However, less than two years after the project ended, those communities were hit by a cyclone.

The MRR Innovation Lab support was a good opportunity to test our earlier observation about women’s assets after a shock. We were getting ready to go to the field when COVID-19 happened. Our team of enumerators who would conduct household surveys were literally on the bus ready to go out.

When we went back in 2022, we introduced an additional survey module to look at the impacts of COVID-19, a horrible shock that has affected almost everyone on the planet. We are also interested in whether women have been able to hold onto their assets or at least not deteriorate their asset holding as much compared to those who did not receive ANGeL programming.

What did your initial evaluation of the ANGeL project show about how development programming might affect women and men differently?

One of the things that was unique about ANGeL was that the training was given to husbands and wives together. One of the things that characterizes a lot of nutrition and agricultural extension is that nutrition training is given to women and agricultural training is given to men. This type of dichotomy tends to perpetuate stereotypical gender roles.

When the training was given together instead, both men’s and women’s empowerment scores improved. It was quite an innovation to have trainings administered to men and women together.

Another thing that was interesting is that we divided the nutrition training into two arms, one given by extension workers, who were most often men, and the other given by community nutrition workers, who were women. Both types of workers did equally well at disseminating the information.

We found that the only area where same-sex workers had an advantage was in changing the gender-related attitudes score. If a man was trained by a male extension worker, he had more improvement in progressive gender attitudes. It was the same for women. Aside from that, all other impacts were practically identical.

The implication of this for agricultural extension really can’t be underestimated, especially in South Asia. In Africa a lot of literature shows that same-sex extension works better, but we don’t see it in South Asia because the farming systems are so different. The fact that male extension workers can step in and learn to teach about nutrition is good because the agricultural extension system is still staffed by men, and if you want to teach about nutrition-sensitive agriculture, you can’t wait until there are enough women in the pipeline.

A lot is said about the importance of women’s empowerment, but what does that look like in the household?

We have a measure, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has now been used in 58 countries worldwide. With WEAI, we can actually compare countries in South Asia and Africa in terms of sources of women’s empowerment.

What’s interesting is that you typically observe higher levels of women’s empowerment in African countries compared to South Asian countries. The barriers to empowerment are the same: lack of access to group membership, excessive workload, also lack of access to financial services. These show up worldwide.

WEAI rolled out in 2012, and as more people started using it they asked for a shorter version that was easier to administer in the field. Other agricultural development programs wanted to use it for impact evaluation and for measuring things that mattered to projects, like attitudes toward domestic violence.

Based on these requests we developed pro-WEAI (project-level WEAI), and it ended up being quite important. Some implementers realized a quite high degree of acceptability toward domestic violence. With further qualitative work, they realized it was really a problem and then developed programming to address it.

These tools have also helped identify unintended consequences of programming. For example, with many livelihood interventions, women’s workload often increases. This can lead to sacrifices in women’s reproductive roles or leave them burned out, stressed out. When women are working harder, they might not be able to look after their own health.

We have also found that where program activities target men and women together rather than just women, men often end up taking on a lot of the domestic chores like cooking and cleaning. In a study across Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal and Niger, men found it empowering to share in the workload in the house. They liked to be able to contribute more and feel more integral to the household.

For programs seeking to overcome gender disparities in agricultural development, what are some of the most important considerations?

Find ways to equalize assets. It’s not about redistributing assets from men to women. It’s increasing the base of assets as a whole, but women have to have a stake in those assets.

Strengthen women’s property rights, meaning she can accumulate assets securely and safely and not have in-laws grab them. Also a legal basis for securing property rights in terms of inheritance and marriage law. If anything happens in a marriage, women are often very unprotected.

Strengthen women’s decision-making capacity in agriculture. Even if women have greater decision-making power in the household, so many households have such a tiny resource base. Increase the total asset base and then maybe greater decision-making power could make a difference. Let’s make sure she has something to decide over.

 

Learn more about the MRR Innovation Lab project, "Gender, Nutrition-Sensitive Agricultural Programs and Resilience in Bangladesh." Also, sign up for MRR Update for leading field-tested research that strengthens livelihoods and resilience among rural communities in developing countries.

 

This report is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) cooperative agreement 7200AA19LE00004. The contents are the responsibility of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.