Transforming Gender and Food Security in the Global South

Jemimah Njuki, John R. Parkins, Amy Kaler, Jemimah Njuki, John R. Parkins, Amy Kaler

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317190011
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Études relatives au genre

Drawing on studies from Africa, Asia and South America, this book provides empirical evidence and conceptual explorations of the gendered dimensions of food security. It investigates how food security and gender inequity are conceptualized within interventions, assesses the impacts and outcomes of gender-responsive programs on food security and gender equity and addresses diverse approaches to gender research and practice that range from descriptive and analytical to strategic and transformative.The chapters draw on diverse theoretical perspectives, including transformative learning, feminist theory, deliberative democracy and technology adoption. As a result, they add important conceptual and empirical material to a growing literature on the challenges of gender equity in agricultural production.

A unique feature of this book is the integration of both analytic and transformative approaches to understanding gender and food security. The analytic material shows how food security interventions enable women and men to meet the long-term nutritional needs of their households, and to enhance their economic position.The transformative chapters also document efforts to build durable and equitable relationships between men and women, addressing underlying social, cultural and economic causes of gender inequality. Taken together, these combined approaches enable women and men to reflect on gendered divisions of labor and resources related to food, and to reshape these divisions in ways which benefit families and communities.

Co-published with the International Development Research Centre.

Part I
Measuring gender relations and women’s empowerment

1
Measuring women’s empowerment in agriculture

Addressing the multidimensional nature of gender dynamics in agriculture

Maureen Miruka, Jemimah Njuki, Laurie Starr, Elizabeth Kruger, and Emily Hillenbrand

Introduction

Gender inequalities continue to undermine the sustainable and inclusive development of the agriculture sector, causing disparities in development outcomes between women and men. These are largely due to the fact that rural women are often constrained by unequal access to productive resources and services, even though evidence has shown that when women control income, they spend more of it on food, health, clothing, and education for their children than men do (FAO 2011). The limitations women face in turn impose huge social, economic, and environmental costs on society as a whole and on rural development in particular, including lags in agricultural productivity (Hill 2011). The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2013 (World Economic Forum 2013) shows that productivity on women’s farms is significantly lower per hectare compared to men’s, ranging from 13 percent in Uganda to 25 percent in Malawi. In a bid to address this gender gap, women’s empowerment in agriculture and its measurement has been a focus of many research and development organisations in the recent past, and the development of tools and methods for measuring women’s empowerment has therefore been growing.

Women are clearly an important part of the agricultural labour force, but agriculture and agricultural value chains are equally important to women as a source of food and employment. Aggregate data show that women represent about 43 percent of the agricultural labour force globally and in developing countries (FAO 2011). In Africa, estimates of the time contribution of women to agricultural activities are as high as 60 to 80 percent in some countries (FAO 2011). Improvements in the status of women, both within and outside the household, are of vital importance to ensure better nutritional outcomes in general and to reduce child malnutrition in particular (Meinzen-Dick et al. 2012). Worldwide data further indicate that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent (FAO 2011). That fact alone could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100 to 150 million. This demonstrates the critical need for addressing gender inequalities and women’s empowerment in agriculture as a matter of food and nutrition security.

The most recent development in the measurement of women’s empowerment is the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) developed for the Feed the Future program (Alkire et al. 2012; Alkire et al. 2013). It provides a quantifiable index to measure women’s empowerment in agriculture programs. The WEAI measures the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector in an effort to identify ways to overcome obstacles and constraints. This index is a significant innovation in its field and aims to increase understanding of the connections between women’s empowerment, food security, and agricultural growth. It allows the identification of women who are disempowered, and informs interventions to increase autonomy and decision-making in key areas. The WEAI measures the roles and extent of women’s engagement in the agriculture sector in five domains: (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decision-making power over productive resources, (3) control over use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time use. It also measures women’s empowerment relative to that of men within their households.

While the WEAI captures many of the fundamental gender inequalities in the agriculture sector, it does not fully reflect the holistic and strategic approach to empowerment reflected in the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere’s (CARE) theoretical understanding – particularly the definitions of autonomy, self-confidence, mobility, and gender-equitable attitudes – that reflect the agency and structural levels of empowerment relevant to a market-oriented model for empowerment in agriculture. In 2012, CARE, in collaboration with Technical Assistance to non-governmental organisations (TANGO) International, combined the WEAI and the CARE Women’s Empowerment Framework to develop an adapted index (the Women’s Empowerment Index, or WEI) that captures these individual and social dimensions of women’s empowerment. The CARE Women’s Empowerment Framework recognises the role of gender transformative approaches that not only change women’s agency, but also influence the relations between men and women and between women and the broader society, and that engage men as agents of change in achieving gender equality.

Theoretical background

Defining and measuring women’s empowerment

Kabeer (1999) defines empowerment as the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire that ability. This ability to exercise choice has three interrelated dimensions: (1) resources, which are a precondition for people to make choices, (2) agency, or the process through which people get the ability to define their goals and act upon them, and (3) achievements, or the outcomes of those choices. A major contribution of Kabeer’s definition of empowerment that has implications for how women’s empowerment is defined and measured is the distinction between “differences” and “inequality” – preferences in choices vs. the denial of choice. Sen (1985) refers to empowerment as capabilities, or the potential that people have for living the lives they want. CARE defines women’s empowerment as the sum total of changes needed for a woman to realise her full human rights – the interplay of changes in agency (her own aspirations and capabilities), structure (the environment that surrounds and conditions her choices), and relations (the power relations through which she negotiates her path) (CARE 2006).

The conceptualisation of women’s empowerment as not just a social justice issue and an end in itself, but also as an instrumental concept that has policy and development implications, has led to efforts to measure it. This instrumentalisation of empowerment has sparked a proliferation of studies, methods, and approaches to measure empowerment with the aim of facilitating comparisons of empowerment across locations or over time, measuring impacts of different interventions on empowerment, and relating empowerment to broader policy and development outcomes. There are two main ways in which women’s empowerment has been measured: using indicators of basic needs achievements such as education, political participation, etc.; and using indices that combine multiple aspects of empowerment (such as the Human Development Index or the Gender Empowerment Index used by the United Nations Development Program).

Pertinent to the results presented in this chapter, Narayan (2005), Kabeer (1999), and Ibrahim and Alkire (2007) point to the complexity of measuring empowerment. Challenges include the multidimensional nature of empowerment; the multiplicity of indicators that can be used as proxies for empowerment, and their validity; balancing the need to adjust for context and the need to standardise; and which definition of empowerment to use (the researcher’s or the subject’s).

Women’s empowerment, agriculture productivity, and food security

There are various pathways to improving food and nutrition security: through increasing agricultural production and productivity that leads to an increase in food availability and a reduction in food prices; increasing incomes and therefore people’s purchasing power; and empowering women (World Bank 2014). Women’s empowerment has been associated with various development outcomes. A cross-country study of developing countries covering the period 1970–95 found that 43 percent of the reduction of hunger that occurred was attributable to progress in women’s education. This was almost as much as the combined effect of increased food availability (26 percent) and improvements to the health environment (19 percent) during that period. An additional 12 percent of the reduction of hunger was attributable to increased life expectancy of women. Thus, fully 55 percent of the gains against hunger in these countries during those 25 years were due to the improvement of women’s situation within society (Smith and Haddad 2000).

Various studies have also shown positive associations between such indicators as women’s education and children’s health outcomes such as height, weight, or immunisation (Dwyer and Bruce 1988; Hobcraft 1993; Buvinic and Valenzuela 1996; Haddad et al. 1997; Quisumbing and Maluccio 2003; Pitt et al. 2006). Studies by Doss (2005), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2010), and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW 2006) have shown that women’s ownership of property can to lead to improved children’s welfare. The OECD’s Development Centre noted that countries where women lack the right to own land have, on average, 60 percent more malnourished children compared to countries where women have some or equal access to credit and land. This demonstrates that there is clearly a relationship between women’s control of assets, their share in decision-making power within the household, and nutritional outcomes (OECD 2010).

Methodology

The CARE Pathways Program

The goal of CARE’s Pathways to Empowerment Program (Pathways) is to increase the productivity and empowerment of poor women smallholder farmers in more equitable agriculture systems at scale. The program works with 50,000 poor women smallholder farmers and others in their households and communities in six countries (Mali, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi, Bangladesh, and India). It is guided by a unifying theory of change focused on five change levers: increased capacity and skills of women smallholders; expanded access to services, assets, and inputs; increased productivity; greater influence over household decisions; and a more enabling environment for gender equity, both within communities and in extension and market systems.

Adapting the WEAI to CARE Pathways’ theory of change

CARE has developed a model of women’s empowerment that recognises empowerment as a dynamic function of changes in three dimensions: agency, the skills, capacities, and confidence to act in one’s own interest and meet one’s own aspirations; relations, the gender rules that govern the interpersonal relationships (within and without the household) that mediate women’s ability to make choices, access resources, and take advantage of opportunities; and structures, the institutional rules – including informal social norms as well as formal rules of institutions (such as land laws, lending institutions, or extension systems) – that condition women’s choices (CARE 2006). This model of social change retains a political focus on shifting power, not only in supporting the individual’s ability to make (autonomous) choices, but in challenging and changing the institutional context that restricts women’s opportunities and underpins their social subordination.

To ensure that sectoral programming focuses on a holistic expansion of women’s strategic life choices, CARE identified a number of core “areas of inquiry” that reflect critical areas in women’s lives where gender rules and norms disfavour and limit their choices, capacities, and rights. As each program is designed, gender analysis is carried out across these core areas of inquiry to conceptualise how programmatic models (affecting agency, structure, and relations) would bring about outcomes in these areas. These core areas then become the indicators by which em...