Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI GENDER AND FOOD SYSTEMS: Avenues for Transformation? Agnes Quisumbing

#2023ReSAKSS #2023ATOR Framing the question • Approximately 1.23 billion people worldwide involved in agrifood systems • In Africa, between 2/3 to 4/5 of all jobs are in agrifood systems; non- agricultural food systems jobs account for a small portion, mostly in urban areas (Davis et al. 2023) • Some changes—rapid urbanization, increased commercialization, move to high-value nodes of the value chain—can increase economy-wide inequalities, such as exclusion of poor or marginalized farmers • Inequalities related to gender compound those related to poverty • Access to key inputs (land, livestock, extension, financial services) highly gender inequitable (FAO 2011, 2023) • Women spend 3 x as many hours as men on unpaid work, have higher total work burden considering both paid and unpaid work (UN 2020) • Gender inequalities intersect with caste, class, life-cycle stage

Can food systems transformation be gender equitable? Why do we care? What can policies and interventions do? Increased market orientation Increase in rural nonfarm enterprises Increase in non-agricultural employment Migration and urbanization

Women’s agency (choices, bargaining power, preferences, capacities, aspirations) Biophysical and environmental Demographic Sociocultural Political and economic Technology and infrastructure Structural gender inequalities Gendered shocks and vulnerabilities Value Chains • Production • Processing • Distribution and Storage • Marketing Food Environment • Availability • Affordability • Promotion, Advertising, and Information • Quality and Safety Consumer Behavior Choices on what to eat based upon: • Price • Income • Information • Preferences Nutrition, diet and food security outcomes Gender equality and women’s empowerment Economic and livelihood outcomes Environmental outcomes DRIVERS OUTCOMES Access to and control over resources (information, education, land, finance, technology, etc.) Gendered social norms (expectations, traditions, etc.) Policies and governance Systemic Individual Informal Formal Well-being outcomes The Gender and Food Systems Framework Source: Adapted from Njuki et al. 2022

• Evidence from a synthetic review (Myers et al. 2023) • Measures of women’s empowerment and gender equality based on Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) (Alkire et al. 2013; Malapit et al. 2017) • Outcome measures: • Nutrition, diet, household food security, WASH • Economic and livelihood outcomes • Measures of life satisfaction and child schooling Why should we care? 15% 5% 2% 5% 8% 2% 2% 3% 3% 31% 3% 5% 13% 3% Distribution of studies by country, global (n=39) Ghana Kenya Malawi Mozambique Niger Rwanda Tanzania Uganda Zambia Bangladesh Cambodia India Nepal Timor Leste

#2023ReSAKSS #2023ATOR Main findings • Increasing women’s empowerment and closing empowerment gaps contribute to improved food system outcomes, but household wealth, gender norms and country-specific institutions are also critical • Findings context-specific • Most papers identified illustrate associative relationships; need future research to determine causal relationships • Addressing structural and institutional barriers to gender equality in policy may enhance outcomes

#2023ReSAKSS #2023ATOR Can Food Systems Interventions be Designed to Promote Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality?

Findings from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) Portfolio and synthesis of UN Joint Program for Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment (JP RWEE) Nutrition Income and Nutrition Crops ANGeL (Bangladesh) TRAIN (Bangladesh) WorldVeg (Mali) AVC (Bangladesh) iDE (Ghana) Livestock Heifer (Nepal) Maisha Bora (Tanzania) MoreMilk (Kenya) SE LEVER (Burkina Faso) Crops and livestock FAARM (Bangladesh) WINGS (India) JP-RWEE (Ethiopia) JP-RWEE (Kyrgyzstan) JP-RWEE (Nepal) JP-RWEE (Niger) Grameen Foundation (Burkina Faso)

Include women in program activities Reaching women means ensuring that women have the same opportunity to access the program activities as men. Increase women’s well- being (e.g. food security, economic empowerment, health). Requires more than reaching women: • Women value the intervention • Direct benefits accrue to women • Women’s needs, preferences and constraints are considered in the intervention design and implementation arrangements Strengthen ability of women to make strategic life choices and to put those choices into action. Goes beyond reaching and benefiting women: • Increases women’s agency • Changes gender attitudes among participants* *could be considered transformative, though depends on scale Goes beyond the woman to change gender norms and structures on a larger scale (changing households, communities and systems). Goes beyond empowering individual women: • Involves men • Changes gender norms at the community and societal levels • Addresses structural and institutional barriers • Mobilizes the power of the collective Benefit Empower Reach Transform Reach, Benefit, Empower, Transform (RBET) Framework Need strategies and tactics appropriate for each type of objective

#2023ReSAKSS #2023ATOR Women empower themselves— projects and interventions provide the opportunity Photo: Fada, HKI

Distribution of project impacts on women’s and men’s empowerment scores, empowerment status, and household gender parity, African projects in GAAP2 and JP RWEE portfolios 1 3 3 1 2 5 5 4 7 12 3 1 2 3 3 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 Gender parity Whether empowered Empowerment score Whether empowered Empowerment score Hous ehold Men Women Negative Null Positive Source: Quisumbing et al. 2022, 2023

#2023ReSAKSS #2023ATOR Can agricultural development projects and food systems interventions empower women and improve gender equality? • Even with empowerment objectives, many agricultural development projects do not achieve significant impacts on empowerment indicators (within the time frame of the evaluations) • Regional effects are important, and so are underlying gender norms • We need to be mindful of potential backlash, which is why collecting data on men is important • We need to pay attention to workload. But some projects are successful!

What can we learn from successful projects? • Successful projects: oare intentional about empowerment otry to address underlying gender norms and structures that restrict women ooften work through women’s groups oinvolve men and influential household and community members as part of the solution

Implications for the design of (transformative) food systems interventions • Intentionality is important for food systems interventions to be transformative • Need to pay attention to both project implementation and context • Intensity of implementation is important. “Light touch” interventions may not yield expected results. Some base level of empowerment and complementary resources may be needed (time, material resources, information, financial resources) • Sustainability of intervention’s services also important: case of households that lost access to credit in a rural savings and loan association project in Ethiopia

Guidelines for gender-transformative food systems programming • Be mindful of local context and gender norms • Programs can build on success of group-based approaches (but be mindful of not overloading groups) • Be mindful of workload implications for both women and men • Need to involve men in gender-sensitive programming • Empowerment is multidimensional: interventions that target only one aspect may not achieve empowerment objectives • Make sure that empowerment measures are part of program M&E and impact assessment.

Resources • Reach, Benefit, Empower video: https://youtu.be/fLGeZBLpaBY • Johnson, N., M. Balagamwala, C. Pinkstaff, S. Theis, R. Meinzen-Dick, and A. Quisumbing. (2018). How do agricultural development projects empower women? What hasn’t worked and what might. Journal of Agriculture, Gender, and Food Security 3(2):1-19. http://agrigender.net/views/agricultural-development-projects-empowering- women-JGAFS-322018-1.php • Morgan, M., A.M. Larson, S. Trautman, E. Garner, M. Elias, and R. Meinzen-Dick. (2023). Gender transformative approaches to strengthen women’s land and resource rights. Bogor, Indonesia: Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and Nairobi: World Agroforestry (ICRAF) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) https://www.cifor-icraf.org/publications/pdf/project-briefs/GTA-Brief.pdf • Myers, E., J. Heckert, S. Faas, H. Malapit, R. Meinzen-Dick, K. Raghunathan, and A. Quisumbing. 2023. “Is Women’s Empowerment Bearing Fruit? Mapping Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) Results Using the Gender and Food Systems Framework.” IFPRI Discussion Paper No. 2190. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136722 • Quisumbing, A. B. Gerli, S. Faas, J. Heckert, H.J. Malapit, C. McCarron, R. Meinzen-Dick, F. Paz. (2023) Assessing Multicountry Programs Through a “Reach, Benefit, Empower, Transform” Lens. Global Food Security 37: 100685. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2023.100685 • Quisumbing, A. R., R.S. Meinzen-Dick, H. J. Malapit, G. Seymour, J. Heckert, C. Doss, N. Johnson, D. Rubin, G. Thai, G. Ramani, E. Meyers and the GAAP2 for pro-WEAI Study Team (2022). Can agricultural development projects empower women? A synthesis of mixed methods evaluations using pro-WEAI in the gender, agriculture, and assets project (phase 2) . IFPRI Discussion Paper 2137. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136405

WEAI Resource Center weai.ifpri.info Guides and Instruments Pro-WEAI Distance Learning Course http://elearning.foodsecurityportal.org/ Tool for “Choosing the right WEAI”

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