CGIAR GENDER Platform evidence module outputs

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10568/114342

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Making Agricultural Extension Services Gender Sensitive
(Blog Post, 2024-11) Chander, Mahesh
Gender disparities in the downstream nodes of the rice value chain in Eastern Uganda: Roles, labour, time allocation, and empowerment
(Thesis, 2024-09-30) Oloo, Augustine
Developing country governments and development organizations have labored to integrate both men and women in post-production value chains as a strategy for poverty alleviation, economic growth, employment generation, gender equality, and improved well-being. Despite the rapid mainstreaming of inclusiveness in policy discourse, remarkably little literature sheds light on the changes over time in post-production agricultural value chains. This study addresses this gap. Using data collected from 515 downstream rice value chain actors in Eastern Uganda, the study analyzes the distribution of roles, allocation of time, and empowerment among women and men. It also assesses the determinants of their time allocation to the downstream nodes of the rice value chain using linear regression. To account for endogeneity, the study used the two-step control function approach in the treatment-effects model to determine the effect of engagement in downstream nodes of the rice value chain on the empowerment of men and women. Results showed that the downstream nodes of the rice value chain and most of the activities are dominated by men. Women on the other hand dominated activities that were less renumerated such as sorting and cleaning rice and preparing food for workers. Findings on time allocation showed that men and women spend 5-8 hours per day in the downstream nodes of the rice value chain with men spending significantly more time than women. Time allocation to the downstream nodes of the rice value chain depends on the sex of the actor, association membership, engagement in non-agricultural activities, engagement in rice production, and marital status. The Individual Empowerment Index showed that the mean individual empowerment score for men is significantly higher than for women. Men are also more empowered than women in the income, leadership, and time allocation domains. Women on the other hand are more empowered than men in the household livelihood domain. Engagement in milled rice trading was found to significantly lower the empowerment scores of women. The study recommends efforts to increase women’s visibility in post-production nodes of agricultural value chains. The study recommends strategies such as improvement in infrastructure that reduces household labor, such as reliable water and electricity supply to reduce the domestic work burden for women, enabling them to invest more time in productive. The study also recommends the creation of gender awareness through education especially in the early years to eliminate stereotypes.
Are we missing the mark? Gender and Intersectional Data Gaps in Climate Smart Agriculture
(Blog Post, 2024-11-13) CARE International
In today’s world, food is a scarce resource for millions of people. Despite numerous efforts by individuals, organizations, governments and institutions to enhance food security, the World Health Organization (WHO) conservatively estimates that between 2030 and 2050 climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 deaths per year resulting from malnutrition, diarrhea and heat stress (WHO 2021). Women and girls often face the most severe impacts of food insecurity caused by climate change, often eating last and least. CARE’s analysis has estimated that 150 million more women were hungry than men in 2021 (CARE 2022). To address global food insecurity, Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a paradigm aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity, resilience and sustainability. Over time, CSA has been adopted by development partners and governments across the globe. But does it really deliver its promises to the most vulnerable? The CSA framework, as initially defined, includes three main objectives: (i) to sustainably enhance agricultural productivity and improve food security, (ii) to strengthen farmers’ resilience and their capacities to adapt to climate change, and (iii) to minimize or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions whenever feasible (FAO 2013; FAO and CARE 2019). Gender equality was not a primary focus during the development of CSA strategies, which may account for the limited investment in gender-equality initiatives within CSA programming. As a result, international agricultural research and development organizations have faced challenges in effectively incorporating gender-equality considerations into agricultural program processes and outcomes.
Gender responsive agricultural extension services
(Infographic, 2024-11) Sinha, I.
Infographic prepared for a workshop on gender-responsive agricultural extension: transforming practice, policy and institutions, held in Hydrabad, India.
Digital Innovations Supporting Women Agri-entrepreneurs in India: Mapping Good Practices
(Working Paper, 2024-06-30) Dominic, D.M.; Bhuvana, N.; Mittal, N.; Sulaiman, R.V.; Puskur, Ranjitha
Agribusiness startups are currently redefining the Indian agricultural sector, encouraging a more entrepreneurial mindset among the various stakeholders. This surge of interest coupled with advancements in the digital sector has led to a rapid expansion in the technology and digital solutions ecosystem within the sector. The process of creating a new enterprise is being greatly aided by technologies such as big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and various digital platforms. These technologies are currently helping them with everything from conceptualization of ideas to recognition of opportunities for production, marketing, and distribution. The proliferation of digital technologies is offering unprecedented opportunities for women to participate in, and lead, agricultural enterprises in India by helping them overcome the many longstanding barriers they once faced, including limited access to information, resources, and markets. However, despite these positive developments, challe
Women at the Helm: Navigating the Digital Landscape of Agriculture
(Report, 2024-06-30) Dominic, D.M.; Bhuvana, N.; Mittal, N.; Sulaiman, R.V.; Puskur, Ranjitha
Agribusiness startups are reshaping India’s agricultural sector, fostering a strong entrepreneurial mindset. This growing interest, alongside advancements in digital technology, has spurred rapid expansion in the sector’s technology and digital solutions ecosystem. Technologies like big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and various digital platforms play a crucial role, aiding aspiring entrepreneurs from idea conceptualization to identifying opportunities in production, marketing, and distribution. The proliferation of digital technologies presents unprecedented opportunities for women to engage and lead agricultural enterprises in India, overcoming longstanding barriers such as limited access to information, resources, and markets. Despite these advancements, challenges persist, and adoption of digital technologies varies widely among enterprises. In the Indian context, research on the use of digital solutions by women agripreneurs remains limited. In 2023, the Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy (CRISP) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) conducted a study, as part of the Evidence Module of the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform, interviewing 16 selected women agripreneurs in India. The study aimed to understand their utilization of digital tools, exploring the types of tools used, developed digital solutions, and how these facilitate enterprise-building processes. Each entrepreneur shared insights on their use of digital tools, highlighting benefits in networking, self-learning, upskilling, education, e-commerce, sales, and enterprise management. While digital technologies have opened avenues for career advancement, women agripreneurs acknowledge gaps in fully harnessing these potentials. The study identified two types of enterprises led by women in the digital ecosystem: digitech enterprises, often founded by women with a background in technology, and digitally enabled enterprises, leveraging various digital technologies to promote their businesses. The majority of women entrepreneurs operate digitally enabled enterprises, reflecting the tech-driven nature of modern agribusiness. This compilation of interviews illustrates how digital innovations support women agripreneurs in India, showcasing their entrepreneurial journeys, aspirations, challenges, and strategies to overcome these challenges through digital interventions and other forms of support. It is intended to benefit those supporting women agripreneurs, particularly within India’s agribusiness incubation centres, offering valuable insights and lessons for leveraging digital innovations to enhance enterprise performance. We sincerely believe that each of these life stories will also inspire several budding women agripreneurs and help them assess their digital capacity gaps and take steps to address these.
Realizing Women’s Potential in Agri-Food Systems
(Conference Proceedings, 2024) Vemireddy, Vidya; Puskur, Ranjitha
A stakeholder dialogue on “Realizing Women’s Potential in Agri-Food Systems’ was organized by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) in collaboration with CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform and International Rice Research Institute on September 19, 2024. Experts across academia, civil society and international organizations working at the intersection of agri-food systems and gender were invited to participate in the discussions, which were helmed by Dr Vidya Vemireddy, Assistant Professor at IIMA and Dr Ranjitha Puskur, Lead, Evidence Module, CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform. The dialogue was conceptualized to: ● Identify the key sticky challenges and policy barriers that women in agri-food systems face and remain unaddressed despite years of R&D efforts. ● Map the data and evidence we have at present and identify the black boxes. ● Build a problem prioritization matrix to identify challenges that require immediate attention. ● Explore solutions, strategies, and good practices to address structural barriers faced by women. ● Chart a collaborative pathway forward and work towards building a coalition of actors in the ecosystem of women in agri-food systems. The discussions revealed rich insights and enabled sharing of ideas, with consensus on several challenges to women realizing their potential in agri-food systems, beyond the often-discussed narrative on lack of access to resources. These included access to extension services, inability to articulate and document their concerns and solutions, gender and socio-cultural norms, policy gaps such as a lack of a co-designed approach to design as well as institutional bottlenecks. However, there was an acknowledgement that access to financial institutions, collectivization, grassroot level organizational interventions, political participation, skill mapping and the creation of a multistakeholder stakeholder platform were effective short and medium-term solutions to mitigate barriers faced by women in agri-food systems with high feasibility of implementation. Finally, the stakeholders deliberated on the idea of creating a coalition/group to integrate evidence and data across academia, civil society and the private sector and generate research and policy traction to realize women’s potential in agri-food systems in a systematic manner. Following this dialogue, the suggested three-point action plan includes; ● Mapping the contributions and recognition of women’s vital roles in the agricultural value chain, from production to marketing. ● Defining the institutional contours of a coalition/group for women in agri-food systems including objectives, core members, membership tenets, etc. ● Creation of a portal to compile good practices, evidence, and learnings from what has worked and what has not to facilitate development of strategies for scaling across contexts.
The impact of agricultural extension programs on women’s empowerment in agriculture and food systems in the global south: A systematic review
(Thesis, 2024) Acosta, S.L.
This systematic review examines the best agricultural extension methods in the context of women’s empowerment, centering improvements in agency, achievements, and resources. Agricultural extension programs use projects and trainings to improve a community’s agriculture system by disseminating information through individual or group trainings, focus groups, on-farm demonstrations, or through the transfer of technologies. Many extension programs work in rural, impoverished communities. Unfortunately, extension practitioners often overlook women’s roles, failing to consider how the program may affect them, despite women being the primary farm laborers [2]. In this thesis research, I analyzed studies published since 2000 with the coding assistance of other students and my advisor. The studies included in this systematic review include at least one dimension of women’s empowerment (or disempowerment). In this review, I investigated the extension practices with highest retention rates, adaptability, and consideration for cultural and social realities to understand how agricultural extension empowers women. Most studies in this review involved communities in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia and provided training on the several different types of agriculture topics: irrigation, climate change resilience, inputs and fertilizer, plant breeding, and more. Using online databases like SCOPUS and Agricola, I gathered 62,517 papers and narrowed them down to the 90 final papers analyzed in this systematic review, through an extensive series of reviewing and coding. Using Naila Kabeer’s multidimensional empowerment research [7] as a theoretical framework, I found that most studies that measured women’s empowerment had indicated some level of empowerment while some did have unintended consequences provoking disempowerment while others showed empowerment in unintended areas. In this systematic review, I offer insight to understand women’s roles in agricultural communities and the significant socio-economic implications that may occur as a result from empowerment agendas in extension.
Is agricultural labour feminizing in South and South East Asia: Analysis of demography and health services data on women and work
(Journal Article, 2023-07-11) Oloo, Stephen; Galiè, Alessandra; Teufel, Nils
'Feminisation of agriculture’ is generally utilized to indicate an expansion of women’s engagement in agricultural production, as labourers or decision-makers. Feminization of Agriculture is often reported as a global trend. While literature on feminization of agriculture (FoA) has seen a steady rise in the last decade, there is little consensus on defining feminization of agriculture and consistent approaches that provide comparative quantitative data on FoA are lacking. This compromises the ability to provide a comparative understanding of the extent of feminization across various regions. In this paper, we develop a methodological approach to assessing the extent of FoA and deploying it on DHS data from South and South-East Asia. Our data show that in Cambodia, India, Indonesia and Nepal the trend has been towards a Masculinization of Agriculture between 2005 and 2017, while no trend could be determined for the Philippines. We discuss the implications of our results while highlighting some of the limitations of our approach and suggesting possible next research steps.
Scoping review on gender-disaggregated data in climate smart agriculture
(Presentation, 2023-05-24) CARE
The Working Woman’s ‘Time Poverty’ in the Polders
(Newsletter Article, 2022-06) International Rice Research Institute
In the polders, women often provide unpaid labor in their agricultural activities. They are heavily involved in crop production, homestead gardening, gher operations, as well as livestock and poultry raising. However, the trend is changing; the number of women working in paid jobs in the polders is increasing.
PROTOCOL: Interventions promoting resilience through climate-smart agricultural practices for women farmers: A systematic review
(Journal Article, 2022-09) Saran, Ashrita; Singh, Sabina; Gupta, Neha; Walke, Sujata Chodankar; Rao, Ranjana; Simiyu, Christine; Malhotra, Suchi; Mishra, Avni; Puskur, Ranjitha; Masset, Edoardo; White, Howard; Waddington, Hugh Sharma
This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objectives are as follows: the primary objective of this review is to synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of interventions to promote climate‐smart agriculture to enhance agricultural outcomes and resilience of women farmers in low‐and‐middle‐income countries (research question 1). The secondary objective is to examine evidence along the causal pathway from access to interventions to promote climate‐smart agriculture to empowering women so that they can use climate‐smart technology. And such outcomes include knowledge sharing, agency improvement, resource access and decision‐making (research question 2).
PROTOCOL: Gender transformative approaches in agriculture for women's empowerment: a systematic review
(Journal Article, 2022-09) Singh, S.; Mohan, A.; Saran, A.; Puskur, Ranjitha; Mishra, A.; Etale, L.; Cole, Steven M.; Masset, E.; Waddington, Hugh Sharma; MacDonald, H.; White, Howard
This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objective of this systematic review is to assess the effectiveness of interventions with gender transformative approach (GTA) components in improving women's empowerment in low- and middle-income countries, and to curate evidence on the mechanisms through which GTA works to improve women's empowerment in agriculture.
Conducting a systematic review: Methodology and steps
(Report, 2021-06-15) Leveraging Evidence for Access and Development
Systematic reviews have gained momentum as a key method of evidence synthesis in global development research in recent times. As defined in the Cochrane Handbook on Systematic reviews “Systematic reviews seek to collate evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question. They aim to minimize bias by using explicit, systematic methods documented in advance with a protocol.” It is important to highlight that a systematic review is different from a literature review. While a literature review qualitatively summarises evidence with no specific protocol or search criteria, a systematic review is based on a clearly formulated question, identifies relevant studies, appraises their quality and summarizes the evidence by use of a selected explicit methodology. It is this explicit and systematic approach that distinguishes systematic reviews from traditional reviews and commentaries. It is also important to distinguish between a systematic review and a meta-analysis. While a systematic review refers to the entire process of selection, evaluation and synthesis of evidence; meta-analysis is a specialised sub-set of systematic review.3 Meta-analysis refers to the statistical approach of combining data derived from systematic review. It uses statistical techniques to combine the data examined from individual research studies and uses the pooled data to come to new statistical conclusions. Hence not all systematic reviews will include a meta-analysis, but a meta- analysis is necessarily in a systematic review. The main purpose of this document is to provide guidelines, recommendations and propose a methodology for conducting mixed- method systematic reviews for evidence synthesis for “gender in agriculture and food systems” for the CGIAR GENDER Platform. In this document we highlight some of the good practices from leading organisations who have contributed to the development of methodology for Systematic Reviews over the years. Throughout the document, we refer to relevant guidelines recommended by these organisations for conducting systematic reviews and adapt it to the proposed questions that include synthesis of qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method evidence.
Gender in agriculture and food systems: An Evidence Gap Map
(Report, 2021-06-15) Leveraging Evidence for Access and Development
The 2007-2008 global food-price crisis disproportionately affected women, particularly smallholder women farmers (Sexsmith et al. 2017).1 The subsequent responses by governments, multilateral agencies and other institutions over the last decade do not seem to have had the intended effect of addressing underlying power imbalances in agriculture and food systems (Botreau and Cohen 2020).2 CGIAR has been at the forefront of a mission to change the status-quo through impactful gender research. The CGIAR Generating Evidence and New Directions for Equitable Results (GENDER) Platform catalyzes targeted research on gender equality in agriculture and food systems and collaborates with decision-makers to achieve a new normal: a world in which gender equality drives a transformation towards equitable, sustainable, productive and climate-resilient food systems. Closing the knowledge gaps in gender and agriculture and food systems is a crucial step towards achieving this vision. This Evidence Gap Map (EGM) attempts to consolidate and integrate evidence on gender in agriculture and food systems, and provides a framework for prioritizing research across different themes, enabling focused evidence synthesis and generation. While most existing EGMs (Moore et al. 2021)3 focus on synthesizing evidence on impact estimates of interventions, this EGM presents a broader landscape of evidence across eleven identified themes in gender in agriculture and food systems. This EGM, however, does not synthesise information, but presents a systematic and interactive matrix of outcomes across all themes based on the existing evidence. The map includes studies that use qualitative, quantitative and mixed method designs.

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