IDENTIFICATION AND ADVOCATING FOR SCALING PARTNERS: INTEGRATING RIGHTS AND LIVELIHOOD PROGRAMS WHILE MEASURING EMPOWERMENT

USING THE WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN AGRICULTURE INDEX (WEAI)

Elizabeth Waithanji, Ph.D.

Expanding Livelihood Opportunities for Poor Households Initiative in East Africa (ELOPHI) Sharing forum at the Crown

Plaza Hotel Nairobi, on 20th August 2013

Justification: Rights and Livelihoods Together

“Human development, if not engendered is endangered (HDR, 1995)” • Engendered development transforms unequal relations of power produced,

justified, maintained, and sustained through socially constructed claims and implemented actions based on “perceived” gender differences – With women being the powerless gender

• Two key pillars that enable and support empowerment include the ability to

exploit economic opportunities and the ability to claim one’s rights

• Yet, development interventions work towards women’s empowerment using one or the other pillar and rarely, both together

• Combining women’s economic opportunities and women’s rights could have the potential to lead to broader women’s empowerment

“What gets measured gets done” (Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Edwards Deming, Lord

Kelvin and others including Hillary Clinton)

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Key messages from participants at the results dissemination, and rights and livelihood integration workshop

Livelihoods and rights are intertwined and inseparable

and development actors should address them together: How?

Partnerships that harness expertise on livelihoods and on

rights are necessary for gender transformative development to happen

Sharing forums, like this one, among [network] actors

Share tools, experiences, and ideas on advancing GTD agenda

Actor capacity building on how to address the barriers in

gender focused rights and livelihood projects and measure

change 3

Impact Pathway – addressing and measuring change (GTD)

Women become more empowered and gender empowerment gap is reduced

Develop analytical framework and

methodology for assessing project impact on women’s

empowerment

Measure the status of men’s and women’s

empowerment and the gender parity in empowerment

1. Document and disseminate results

2. Develop a strategy to enhance women’s empowerment in

development projects

Projects to implement strategies and evaluate impacts on women’s empowerment and gender parity

Develop strategies for ensuring women’s empowerment in development interventions

Project teams build capacity to (i)measure women’s empowerment and gender parity in empowerment; and (ii) implement strategies in projects to ensure women’s empowerment

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Scale up strategy

Identify Potential scale-up partners

• Partners we have worked with – KARI, Juhudi Kilimo and EADD

• Potential partners we have shared with regional network on gender and livelihoods; IDRC-CFSRF actors

• Peers who are interested in empowering women through research for development projects e.g. IDRC-CFSRF projects e.g. Root crop and dairy goat project (CGP) in Tanzania and the CBPP subunit vaccine adoption project in Kenya

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Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI)

Schematic representation of the six dimension WEAI

The 1st Sub-Index: THE SIX DOMAINS OF EMPOWERMENT (6DE) DOMAIN INDICATORS

1 Production Input in productive decisions

Autonomy in production

2 Resources Ownership of assets

Purchase, sale, or transfer of assets

Access to and decisions on credit

3 Income Control over use of income

4 Leadership Group membership

Speaking in public

5 Time Workload

Leisure

6* Health Decision making on reproductive

health

Vulnerability to gender based

violence

Adapted from Alkire et al 2012 by Waithanji et al forth coming

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Dissemination: WEAI Results

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

0.35

Men

Wo

me

n

Men

Wo

me

n

Taken loan Not takenloan

DIS

EMP

OW

ERM

ENT

IND

EX (

M0

=1-6

DE)

GBV attitudes

Reproductive health

Work distribution

Leisure

Identity card

Speaking in public

Group membership

Control over use ofincome

Access to anddecisions on credit

Purchase or sale ofassets

Ownership of assets

Autonomy inproduction

Input in productivedecisions

Domains contributing most to women’s disempowerment were resources and health/ rights

Women who took loans more disempowered in the time and leadership domains than those who did not

Well meaning interventions can cause unintended impacts

Waithanji et al forth coming

8 Source: http://www.slideshare.net/ILRI/weai-evaluating-impacts

Feedback Questions – from sharing forums

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1.How can WEAI be adopted in for polygynous communities? What would be the best way to sample so as to avoid interviewing “favorite wives”?

2.When you monitor and document change in WEAI, say from a value of 70 to 75, what does this mean? Is there a statistical test for significance in difference? Ditto for 5DE and GPI?

Answers

1. Two sampling options – either way, proportion of women becomes disproportionately high and requires an adequate budget – Include all wives in the sample – Randomly select two wives or purposively select the

senior wife the randomly select one or two other wives

2. You can’t test for significance in differences in the WEAI because aggregate data was used. So, to test for significance, go back to the men’s and women’s individual scores (5DE)

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Implementation challenges

• It is difficult to find husband and wife, at home, to interview especially in peri-urban and urban areas

• When a husband and wife’s responses contradict, who is right?

• Hard to maintaining the same respondents in repeated (panel – up to 5 yrs) studies

• Property rights – only use the term “WEAI” if using original USAID format

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Stakeholder Workshop Participants roles and interests

CARE, EADD, University of Nairobi, FAO-UN, World Vision International, IRRI, UN-Women, UN-WFP – Share experiences

KARI – To measure empowerment of beneficiaries – women and men in their innovation platforms and seek ways of addressing areas of disempowerment identified

Juhudi Kilimo – to identify strategies of addressing the challenges of control of credit money faced by women from MHH

Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) – To identify ways of integrating livelihood issues when addressing human rights issues 12

Workshop Output: A strategy of integrating livelihoods and rights for empowering women

Three working group sessions:

Integrating rights in agricultural (including livestock) value chain projects

Integrating rights in micro-credit projects and

Integrating livelihoods in rights based projects

Questions answered by each group: Beyond what was presented on WEAI, •What other rights/livelihood indicators would you like to consider integrating in your projects? •What constraints/challenges/issues would you anticipate when integrating rights/ livelihoods? •How and when in the project cycle would you address each of the challenges identified above? •What indicators would you use to measure progress of implementation and change? (Report hard copy circulated here and soft copy in

http://agrigender.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/weai_rightsworkshopreport_may2013.pdf) 13

Conclusions/ Recommendations

Livelihoods and rights are intertwined and inseparable

and development actors should address them together: How?

Partnerships that harness expertise on livelihoods and on

rights are necessary for gender transformative development to happen

Sharing forums, like this one, among [network] actors

Share tools, experiences, and ideas on advancing GTD agenda

Actor capacity building on how to address the barriers in

gender focused rights and livelihood projects and measure

change 14

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Activities towards dissemination

Partner capacity building…

A: Partner training: Together with Enumerators – On research methods and ethics – On gender and development – Livelihoods and rights – WEAI

• concept and method • Data collection tools • Pretesting questionnaires

B: Field work - field data collection and checking questionnaires (Quality control)

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Training cont….

Graduate students, quantitative technicians and scientists C: Data entry – Using CsPro (Training in CsPro before training in data entry) D: Making a data entry template in CsPro E: Concatenate data F: Data cleaning and validation G: Transferring/ export data from CsPro to Stata H: Data analysis using Stata I: Documentation 17

Dissemination

• Presentations and consultations at meetings/ workshops

• Research and workshop reports – hard and soft copies

• Policy briefs

• Peer reviewed articles

• Book??

• Integration of methodology in R4D projects

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Scale up milestones

• Trained KARI technical team

• Training four graduate students MA (UoN), Ph.D (KARI/Uon)

• To use method in new projects – Banana value chain in Meru (MA student)

– Honey value chain in Transmara (Ph.D. student)

– CBPP subunit vaccine (adoption) project in Ijara and Turkana in Kenya (MA and Ph.D. students)

• Future possibility – other vaccine adoption projects in RSA ??

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Thank You!