Empowerment is a complex, multidimensional concept that cannot be observed directly. Given the interlinkages between gender, nutrition and agriculture, it is important to assess both the effects of nutrition and agroecology interventions for women’s empowerment, and the effects of women’s empowerment on nutritional and agroecological outcomes. While many programmes promote gender-responsive actions, and research has been conducted on women’s empowerment, there is a lack of appropriate frameworks and tools to integrate gender empowerment measurement into monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems.
Existing approaches such as the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), its adaptations for projects (Pro-WEAI), for nutrition (WENI), and the abbreviated versions (A-WEAI and A-WENI), all require high level research and statistical skills. They are resource-intensive in terms of survey time and cost. It is difficult to integrate them into project baseline and endline surveys or to adapt them for routine collection of multiple types of information, or for use in programme/project monitoring and evaluation systems to inform technical support.
This was the rationale for developing a simplified approach to measure women’s empowerment in a nutrition and agriculture context. Since 2022, a team of NRI researchers has been involved in designing, testing and validating a simplified approach for measuring women’s empowerment in multisectoral programmes focused on agriculture and nutrition interventions. Drawing on existing approaches to measurement, NRI’s Associate Professor Ravinder Kumar, Professor Vegard Iversen and gender expert Vero Ramananjohany from Madagascar, developed an adaptable and replicable simplified methodology. Following piloting and data analysis, an initial set of 42 questions, were reduced to 25 questions by eliminating less impactful questions.
The simplified approach was piloted in the baseline (2022) and endline (2024) surveys of the EU’s regional programme in Support of Food and Nutritional Security in the Indian Ocean (SANOI). The endline research (2024) provided an opportunity to test its effectiveness in detecting differences in women’s empowerment status due to a programme intervention. The method involved both qualitative and quantitative measurements and was tested through a survey of women of reproductive age (15-49) from households (1609 baseline and 1507 endline) in Madagascar, and 24 focus group discussions with women and men.
Statistical tests were used to evaluate the influence of each question, ensuring the simplified approach preserved assessment quality while reducing complexity. The tests indicated good reliability and consistency between the two methods, with the simplified methodology achieving 92.4% consistency compared to the original. This approach maintained the reliability of the results while allowing for quicker and more cost-effective survey administration. It made it possible to assess the complex phenomenon of women’s empowerment without losing rigour and robustness in measurement.
The simplified approach was equal to existing methods in providing a reliable and robust understanding of women’s empowerment across four domains – decision-making, access and control of resources, participation, leadership and mobility. Decision-making and mobility scored relatively highly, while participation and leadership and access to resources and control scored lower. The survey also revealed that the four domains of women’s empowerment were not systematically correlated with each other and therefore each was an important dimension of measurement to include. The average empowerment score from tests of the methodology in Madagascar was 0.57, which is below the ‘acceptable’ threshold of 0.6. Only 44% of the women achieved an ‘acceptable to desirable’ women’s empowerment score (on a 3-point scale - desirable, acceptable, unsustainable). The application of this approach in the SANOI programme indicated that women’s empowerment scores above the acceptability threshold were associated with less likelihood of being in poverty, greater access to dietary diversity at home and higher agroecological performance.
Piloting and validation of the methodology demonstrated that integrating it into existing M&E systems of agriculture and nutrition programmes is both feasible and effective. The approach allows for adaptation to project-specific questions, and can be easily administered for baseline, endline, and periodic monitoring. While the approach requires further testing and validation in diverse nutrition-sensitive and multi-sectoral contexts, it represents a major first step in developing a replicable and adaptable tool for programme monitoring and evaluation
Ravinder Kumar said: ‘This approach provides programme teams with actionable, real-time data to understand, track and adjust their efforts to support women's empowerment. It provides evidence on a continuous basis for improving activities that can support agroecological adoption, nutrition and women’s empowerment’.
‘Some EU-funded organisations have already adopted the method in their projects on nutrition and women’s empowerment. Other donors, such as the German Agency for International Cooperation (GiZ) have also shown interest in using it,’ he added.