Gender Responsive Research in the CGIAR

Jacqueline Ashby, Senior Advisor for Gender Research, CGIAR Consortium. April 2015

Topics

• Why gender?• Architecture of Gender

Mainstreaming in CGIAR• Strategic Gender Research• Integrated Gender Research

Example: Gender-Responsive Breeding

Why gender?

TerminologyGender Socially defined and learned differences between men or women Gender relations the ways men and women share or compete for resources, bargain and have power over each other

The “gender gap” in agriculture (FAO, 2010)

In most regions of the world, one out of five farms is headed by a women

Women comprise about 40% of people working on farms in low-income countries

Mali women collect firewood for cooking on the dry bed of the Niger

River (photo on Flickr by United Nations).

The “gender gap” in agriculture (FAO, 2010)

Inequalities between women and men producers:

• hold back agricultural productivity (yield gaps of 20-25%)

• perpetuate poverty and unsustainable resource use

• make women more vulnerable to climate-change impacts on agriculture

• are obstacles to the CGIAR achieving its strategic results

Photo P. Casier (CGIAR).

The “gender gap” in agriculture (FAO, 2010)

Inequalities between women and men in:

• Assets for agriculture --land, water, trees, fisheries, livestock, especially insecure property rights

• Labor markets• Access to services- financial,

advisory, business development• Knowledge and skills• Technology• Organization• Supportive institutions and policy

Mali women collect firewood for cooking on the dry bed of the Niger

River (photo on Flickr by United Nations).

In farming, gender inequality is pervasive:

Gender inequality affects:(1) Decisions about agricultural

production and marketing(2) Control over use of resources

like land, water and livestock(3) Control over food availability,

spending and income(4) Leadership in organizations and

bargaining power in markets (5) Time use and workloads

New technology is not adopted

Review of 24 multivariate studies of technological input use, access, and adoption fertilizer, seed varieties, tools, pesticide use, access, and adoption.

• 79 percent of studies found men have higher mean access• 59 percent of studies found when unequal farm size, credit,

capital, extension and other factors are taken into account, the farmer’s sex has no significant effect on output.

• Inequality is what counts!

Benefits from increasing gender equality

• Yield gaps of 20-25% between men and women producers are eliminated

• Marketing and value chains include women on a fair, competitive footing

• Poor rural women increase the food and income under their control which is positively associated with improvements in nutrition, education and welfare for the whole household.

Objective• To improve the relevance of the

CGIAR's research to poor women as well as men (reduced poverty and hunger, improved health and environmental resilience) in all the geographical areas where the work is implemented and targeted by end of 2012.

• By 2015 progress towards these outcomes will be measurable.

Institutional Architecturefor Mainstreaming Gender in Research

Gender Mainstreaming in CGIAR

Objective: Gender is fully integrated into research priority setting, research design and implementation, and final evaluation such that CGIAR innovations do no harm with respect to worsening existing gender inequities and foster positive change in female empowerment.

Gender Monitoring Framework for the CGIAR (Fund Council)- CO reports at each FC meeting to:

• Monitor the integration of gender into research priority setting, implementation and evaluation,

• View budgetary allocations and expenditures with respect to gender,

• See key data related to the numbers of male and female staff in key leadership positions in the CGIAR,

• View progress being made in staffing, research and budget allocations, with respect to gender

• Recommend and implement course corrections as necessary.

Gender Budget for:• Strategic gender research: addresses

questions related to WHY and HOW there are differential results between men and women, such as how does adoption of a new technology change women and men’s income

• Integrated (applied) gender research: addresses questions such as what are the sex-disaggregated impacts of adoption of a new crop variety. It does not investigate the reasons for gender differences.

Consortium Board Policy to mainstream gender in research

•CGIAR (2011) Consortium Level and CRP Gender Strategies•Gender budget (POWBs and Annual Reports)

Consortium Level Gender Strategy

Component 1

Component 1: CRP Gender Strategy

Gender Strategy

Planning considers all relevant gender constraints to the

research process and the uptake of research outputs.

Implementation, monitoring and review throughout all CRPs

Greater expertise in gender analysis

Research outputs and outcomes remove constraints faced by

women farmers

BETTERACHIEVEMENT OF THE

STRATEGIC LEVEL OUTCOMES

Component 2: Diversity and Gender in the workplace

Broad understanding of why diversity and gender are relevant in

research for development

Equality of career progression within the CGIAR

CGIAR succeeds in attracting and retaining some of the world’s top

scientists and service function professionals

.

Implementation of Consortium Level Gender Strategy

Research Planning•CRP Gender Strategy must be approved by Consortium Board•CGIAR Strategic Results Framework has gender as a research priority• Gender research required in annual Plans of Work and Budget• Gender research –a criterion for a successful CRP Proposal (2nd Call)

Research Performance Monitoring•Results in narrative Annual Reports•Performance indicators (Annex 2 of Annual Report template)

Gender Research Network fosters cross-program synergies

Plan for Diversity and Gender in the workplace supports recruitment of world –class social science expertise for gender research

Gender Budget Key investor issue: accountability

Consortium level policy:The Consortium Board has explicitly made an approved CRP Gender Strategy and a satisfactory implementation of this strategy in the CRP program of work and budget 2014 - 2016 prerequisites for CRPs to receive funding from Windows 1 and 2 in 2014 and beyond (Consortium Board, September 2013) CRP level: Accountability of line managers for implementing gender commitments in POWB

Are results commensurate with budget ? CRP Annual Reports

GENDER RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS•What were the major gender research achievements as set out in the gender strategy?•To what CRP outputs and outcomes did they contribute? •What progress was achieved along the gender impact pathway compared to the initial situation?

Attention is on results

Gender “Action Plan”• Approved at FC11 (April, 2014): USD

$6M for 3 years• Designed to:- Speed up development of gender research

expertise in CRPs: Postdoctoral fellowship and Partnership Fund

- Scale up scope and significance of gender research, strengthen cross-CRP knowledge sharing: Global Study; methods to measure gender and nutrition impact ; joint M&E of gender IDO; on-line learning

Support from the Gender Research Network

• Postdoctoral fellow awards• Advanced research training, coaching

and collaboration to support publication • Communications, Data Management and

Knowledge-Sharing Platform – CIAT team supports this

• Cross-program research; sharing methods, synthesizing results

Integrated Gender Research.

Example: How can we make plant

breeding more gender-responsive?

The unintended outcome

Varieties focused on high yield potential:Are left on the shelfFail to meet poorly understood, user preferred quality traitsFail to reach full potential adoption

Slide from G. Thiele

Users have gender-differentiated preferences for varietal traits

• Time to maturity• Taste• Color• By-products• Storage characteristics• Cooking qualities• Field labor

requirements• Fertilizer efficiency

Trait prioritization has a gender dimension

Trade-offs: Women have practical and strategic needsPractical: e.g. less laborious food preparationStrategic: e.g. control over food and marketable surplus

Increased yield of a so-called “women’s crop” can lead to men taking over the crop and her loss of control while better storage quality can improve her control over crop use.– so trait prioritization matters.

Example:The power of bitterness

Women preferred bitter cassava varieties.Sweet cassava can be too readily uprooted and converted into cashOwnership of the cassava harvest“If you only plant non-bitter cassava in your field, you will get a lot of stealing. Especially the young men think it is their right to harvest the fruits of our labor.”“ Men can plant non-bitter cassava because they can call in a diviner and use juju-magic to protect their fields so something evil will happen to a thief”

Control over the cassava harvestThe necessity to exhaustively process the bitter roots for safe consumption gave women more control and the power to decide independently when to harvest themChiwona Karltun et al.

User preferences are shaped by the users’ social characteristics:

“Women” are not a single market segment: The interests of different types of women vary with poverty, culture and roles in farming

Only differentiating men from women is misleading

Women potato sharecropperswithout cattle have different interestsfrom women potato producers who own cattle and do not sharecrop

Breeding for segmented user groups

• The information we need to set priorities and define breeding targets is incomplete and hard to compile (e.g. see World Bank study of PPB, 2008)

• BUT private enterprise confronts this challenge by prioritizing market segments (users) and targeting them

Making a typology helps define segmented user groups

• A social typology is a description of different user types

- with minimum variability within types

- maximum variability between types

- Uses multivariate analysis• Enables classification of

individuals into groups with a common set of preferences

Example

Wheat varieties, Highlands of Ethiopia•Small farmers -76% of wheat production•Few improved, rust-resistant varieties adopted•Women contribute actively to wheat production but are not considered “farmers.”•Gender roles are distinct and women prefer traditional varieties with good “quality”

Example: Use of conjoint analysisStatistical technique from market research used to estimate individual preference models, based on how people value different traits of a productRespondents rate a set of potential (future) products with different combinations of traitsThe valuation of different traits can be determined – and trade-offs analyzed

Conjoint analysis

• The study used participatory evaluations of wheat varieties to identify important traits and preferences

• This generated 6 traits and 14 trait levels to create 18 hypothetical varieties

• Men and women farmers from different wealth strata rated 18 of the possible 144 combinations of traits

• Analysis estimated the importance each individual’s preference gave to each trait

Cluster analysis

• Grouped respondents with similar preferences together -> segmented user groups were identified

• Profiles of user groups defined:

Multinomial Logit model: predicted cluster membership based on gender, wealth, education,

Segmented markets identified• 7 distinct clusters of trait

preferences were identified- each cluster of people values the varietal traits differently

• Overall, cluster membership was weakly correlated with gender

• Some, but not all clusters had predominantly female members

• Source: Nelson, K. 2013

Varietal adoption decisions

Are the product of interactions among-Characteristics of the Variety-Social characteristics of the end Users (inc. gender)

-Characteristics of the socioeconomic Environment

Successful delivery to our intended users takes account of

V x U x EDefines “segmented user groups”

Harmonization and standardization of methods is essential

EG.Use the correct definition of gender: sex of an individual not “female-headed household”

Survey instruments need a standard module to collect sex-disaggregated data so these data can be pooled to characterize user groups

Tools for eliciting user trait preferences are wildly diverse and so data are hard to compare or combine

Harmonization and standardization of methods would permit identification of:

Priority cross-cutting traits for gender responsive breeding•Recurrent gender-differentiated preferences for traits that occur across mega-social- environments

Priority local traits•Specific or unique clusters of preferences and traits that can be targeted to benefit a priority target user group

SUMMARY: How can we make plant breeding more gender

responsive?

Precise socio-economictargeting of segmented user groups

1. Harmonize soc-econ methods and get beyond “village” studies of gendered trait preferences 2. Start with “who?”i.e. a target population

3. Develop a social typology of men and women users in this population

4. Types of men and women users to be targeted by breeding can then be prioritized

SUMMARY: How can we make plant breeding more gender

responsive?

Precise socio-economictargeting of segmented user groups

5. Profile varietal preferences of the priority, gendered user types6. Link gendered user types to relevant products and varietal traits7. Investigate trait trade-offs

Breeding can then deliver more accurately to a pre-defined demand from the priority user group(s), including women

A final word-- to be gender-responsive

• Target well-defined user groups very carefully before you start technology development

• Always consider women in relation to men: gender differences are embedded in gender relations

• Avoid using gender differences simplistically (men vs. women):

Female users can often have more in common with male users in a similar socioeconomic situation, than with other women whose circumstances are different

For more information:

http://cgiar.org

How we do research/ Research on gender in agriculture

Thank you.