Women’s empowerment in all its dimensions

The new year brings about new beginnings and opportunities. A new project titled ‘Evaluating the impacts of livestock and aquaculture microcredit and value chain programs on women’s empowerment’ held its official inception workshop on 12 January 2011. This project aims to improve the impacts of livelihood programs on women and their households by integrating two critical components: creating economic opportunities for women, and women’s rights. Over its two-year implementation period starting January 2012, the project will seek to understand the links between women’s economic empowerment and women’s agency and the exercise of choice from a rights perspective.

Empowerment is multi-dimensional!

It has been widely assumed that the empowerment of women is related to their economic improvement, but scientists in this project strongly believe that women’s empowerment is also related to their ability to freely make choices and decisions based on their options. By having an evaluation and learning component, the project will critically examine women’s economic status and their ability to exercise political and legal rights, which has lacked rigorous research in the past.

Study approach

Case studies from carefully selected projects that integrate women’s economic empowerment through livestock and aquaculture and women’s rights will be analyzed. These projects are:

• Livestock and asset financing by Juhudi Kilimo;
• Women and aquaculture project by Kenya Women Holding;
• Agriculture value  chains project implemented by the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI); and
• East Africa Dairy Development Project (EADD).

These case studies fall in the two types of economic development programs that the project addresses, namely, micro-financing programs for livestock and aquaculture; and livestock value chains.

“Many people in NGOs and the private sector face a lot of challenges in measuring social impact. The method that the project is taking is good because it takes a holistic approach of the women and the men as well. In the long term, it will help us to see the different ways this can be done better,” said Kamathi Ngaruiya of Kenya Women Holding.

Participants at the workshop were extremely excited about this new project as they were confident that the data, information and resources generated would enable them to see how increased opportunities and women rights relate to empowerment. In addition, it is hoped that the project findings will have significant contributions on how gender transformation and women’s empowerment are measured and evaluated.  At the inception workshop, participants brought their diverse experiences to discuss an effective action plan for carrying out the project successfully towards the expected outcomes.

The workshop was attended by project partners from EADD, Juhudi Kilimo, Kenya Women Holding, KARI, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Ford Foundation. The project is led by Jemimah Njuki of ILRI’s Poverty, Gender and Impact Team and financed by the Ford Foundation.
You can find project profile here

Photo credit:  Stevie Mann/ILRI

 

Animal assets empower women in developing countries

Jemimah Njuki leads the Poverty Gender and Impact team at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

In this short film she explains her belief that farm animals are one way for poor women to make money, feed their families better and educate their children. “Owning animal assets gives women power” says Njuki, “… and this gives women a voice … and when women become equal partners, everyone benefits!”

 

FAO and ILRI hold training workshop on integrating gender in livestock projects and programs

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Animal Production and Health Division (AGA) jointly with the Gender, Equity and Rural Employment Division  (ESW) and the Poverty, Gender and Impact (PGI) team of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) held a training workshop on integrating gender in livestock projects and programs for FAO country livestock officers and partners. The activity was designed by Raffaele Mattioli, Senior Officer and Gender Focal Point from the AGA Division, Francesca Distefano, Gender and Development consultant from the ESW Division, and  Jemimah Njuki, Team Leader, Poverty, Gender and Impact at ILRI in close collaboration with Maria Pia Rizzo, Gender Focal Point for the FAO sub-regional office in East Africa.

 The workshop was held at the ILRI Addis Ababa Campus from the 22nd to the 25th of November 2011. The workshop was attended by participants from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Emanuelle GuerneBleich, Livestock Officer, based at the FAO Regional Office in Addis Ababa, gave a presentation on the priorities for the sub region. Jemimah Njuki trained participants on concepts of gender, discussed key gender and livestock issues and took participants through the process of integrating gender in analysis, project design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation using the Socio-Economic and Gender Analysis (SEAGA) framework. Lois Muraguri shared GALVMed experiences in integrating gender in GALVMed’s work and Francesca Distefano from ESW Division at FAO presented draft gender and livestock checklists for dairy, small ruminants and poultry projects.

 The key workshop outputs were gender and livestock checklists for use in the design and implementation of livestock projects and programmes.

View all workshop presentations HERE

FAO news item on the workshop

 

ILRI’s Jemimah Njuki and her work on empowering African women and communities profiled by IDRC

Women pounding grain for the evening meal in Khulungira Village, in central Malawi (image on Flickr by Mann/ILRI).

‘One of the biggest challenges in gender research, says Jemimah Njuki, is getting it wrong. Good intentions grounded in faulty research often leave women worse off than before.

The Kenyan sociologist and gender specialist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has heard the stories first-hand from her work in hundreds of communities throughout Kenya, Tanzania, and southern Africa.

For example, there’s Mercy, a smallholder bean farmer in Malawi who sold produce on the roadside and used the money to buy food and clothes for her family. Then along came a development project that helped increase her yield more than tenfold. It was too much to sell on the roadside, so her husband stepped in and began marketing the beans in the city. The result? Her husband spent less time at home and more of the money. Mercy often ended up with less income than before things were “improved.”

“This is a direct result of faulty research. It assumed these women didn’t know what they were doing. Of course they knew what they were doing and why. Researchers need to understand that larger context, or they can make the situation worse,” said Njuki, following a presentation on her work at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa.

Rewriting the research rule book

Njuki is rewriting the rule book on how agricultural research is done throughout Africa, drawing on her work on the impacts of livestock and market interventions. With support from IDRC and the Ford Foundation, she has created standardized data collection tools — which she plans to publish in a book — that can be used across projects to address gender issues. The tools assess the various challenges and opportunities women face depending on the products they sell (dairy, livestock, or produce, for example), the production system, and the country or region in which they live’…

Read the whole article on the IDRC website

 

Gender, assets,and agricultural development programs: A conceptual framework

This new CAPRi (CGIAR Systemwide Program on
Collective Action and Property Rights) Working Paper by Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Nancy Johnson, Agnes Quisumbing, Jemimah Njuki, Julia Behrman, Deborah Rubin, Amber Peterman and Elizabeth Waithanji  offers a conceptual framework to understand the gendered pathways through which asset accumulation occurs, including attention to not only men’s and women’s assets but also those they share in joint control and ownership.

Unlike previous frameworks, this model depicts the gendered dimensions of each component of the pathway in recognition of the evidence that men and women not only control, own, or dispose of assets in different ways, but also access, control, and own different kinds of assets. The framework generates gender-specific hypotheses that can be tested empirically: i) Different types of assets enable different livelihoods, with a greater stock and diversity of assets being associated with more diverse livelihoods and better well-being outcomes; ii) Men and women use different types of assets to cope with different types of shocks; iii) Interventions that increase men’s and women’s stock of a particular asset improve the bargaining power of the individual(s) who control that asset; and iv) Interventions and policies that reduce the gender gap in assets are better able to achieve development outcomes related to food security, health, and nutrition and other aspects of well-being related to agency and empowerment. The implications of these gender differences for designing agricultural development interventions to increase asset growth and returns to assets as well as for value chain development are discussed. Based on this analysis, additional gaps in knowledge and possible investigations to address them are identified.

View the full text

 

Revised ‘gender, livestock and livelihoods indicators’ report available

The gender, livestock and livelihoods indicators, a reference point for some of the important indicators that ILRI and partners can use to monitor the changing role of livestock in livelihoods in different production systems and the impact of livestock-related interventions has been revised. The document should be used to guide data collection within projects. These may include baseline data, evaluation (both internal and external), impact assessments, project appraisals and any other data collection within the projects and programmes across the institute, including surveys conducted by students where possible. Currently, the indicators are designed for data collection at household level and for integration into household surveys.

You can download and use the indicators, whether in part of full in either pdf or rft format from the link below:

Gender, livestock and livelihoods indicators

Should you require further assistance in using the document, please write to Jemimah Njuki at j.njuki(at)cgiar.org

 

The Missing Link: Jemimah Njuki on TEDx

The TEDx talk given in 2010 on women in agriculture is counted among the International Livestock Research Institute’s (ILRI) achievements on incorporating gender into their research.

Read the more about how far ILRI has come in integrating gender in this article ‘A late (great) start on gender work at the International Livestock Research Institute’ by Jemimah Njuki.

The article is part of the series that ILRI is producing to reflect the changes that have taken place in the institute for the past 10 years culminating to the the November 2011 ‘liveSTOCK Exchange’ event.

 

Gender disaggregation of data: More than a workshop

Gender disaggregated data is an important component to a successful research. A focus on gender has been shown to increase agriculture productivity among other benefits and gender disaggregated data significantly contributes to this success. The ‘Technical Workshop on CAADP M&E: Gender Disaggregation of Data and Tools for Planning’ organised by the Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) and the Poverty, Gender and Impact (PGI) team of ILRI, on the 26- 29 September in Nairobi, Kenya dedicated the first 2 days of this workshop on gender disaggregated data.

The workshop objectives as presented by Dr. Joseph Karugia, the regional coordinator of ReSAKKS in his welcome remark included:

1. To discuss the operationalization of the gender disaggregation of indicators as proposed in the CAADP monitoring and evaluation framework
2. Share successful experiences with collecting, managing and analysing gender disaggregated agriculture and investments data in the region
3. Identify gaps in capacity, tools and methods for collecting, managing and analysing gender disaggregated agriculture and investments data
4. Develop a plan for building capacity and supporting collection, managing and analysing gender disaggregated data at country level

 The business case for gender mainstreaming

Participants were informed about the efforts that ILRI is making to incorporate gender into its operation through the PGI team. This innovative team aims at mainstreaming gender in ILRI programs and to generate evidence on why gender should be mainstreamed at ILRI.

Among the reasons why ILRI aims to mainstream gender include:

• To enable ILRI to have a systematic approach to promoting gender equality / equity at institutional and research level.
• To define the role that ILRI will play in stimulating and facilitating efforts, both in-house and with partners at the national, regional and global levels, to overcome constraints and take advantage of opportunities to promote gender equality and equity within the livestock sub sector
• It is a reflection of the increasing awareness that gender equality and equity are important prerequisites for agricultural growth and sustainable development.

Learning from other countries

In line with the objective of sharing experiences in the region, the workshop participants from the various African countries also had an opportunity to present and share their experiences of managing data on gender in their various countries. This session elicited very interesting discussion with participants learning from each other, identify potential gaps in their various related works and opportunities for developing further.

 The evolution of gender

Evolution of gender started from the time when we had Women in Development (WID) and the reason behind WID was that women needed to participate, this was replaced by Women and Development (WAD) which included the element of trying to figure out  how can women benefit from development and finally the current, Gender and Development (GAD) which was introduced in the 1980s. Some of it’s features include;

• GAD sees women in the same light as men, that is as agents of change rather than as passive recipients of development assistance
• GAD stresses the need for women to organize themselves for more effective political voice
• GAD focuses on strengthening women legal rights, including the reform of inheritance and legal rights

Other topics that were discussed included, CAADP M&E, a review of the gender study by COMESA, practical assignments on disaggregating of data by gender and learning from case studies.

Conclusion

The workshop was a great learning forum, symbolic to a ‘a gender classroom’, where the participants were equipped with information and knowledge that would enable them to become champions of the gender issues at their home institution, give correct policy recommendations to policy makers where gender issues are concerned as well as advise on how to capture and use gender data so as to better shape agriculture research.

Workshop pictures review

Workshop participants pose for a group photo

ILRI’s Poverty Gender and Impact, Jemimah Njuki making a presentation

From left, Petra Saghir, Joseph Karugia, Juliet Wanjiku, Pamela Pali, Liz Waithanji, of ILRI Nairobi at the workshop

ILRI’s Poverty Gender and Impact, Pamela Pali facilitating a practical session

Jemimah Njuki facilitating a learning session

Round table discussion session

Paul Guthiga and Stella Massawe of ILRI, ReSAKKS

Workshop participants enjoying their lunch

Click on this link for pictures from the workshop

 

Collecting gender-disaggregated agriculture data workshop

 A ‘tag cloud’ snapshot of terms used most in a CGIAR Gender & Diversity e-consultation as of 24 Aug 2011 (photo from Flickr by Nancy White).

As part of the efforts to generate evidence on gender and agriculture – including livestock – to inform policy and practice, the Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) and the Poverty, Gender and Impact (PGI) team of the International Livestock Research Institute will be having a training workshop on ‘Collecting Gender Disaggregated Agriculture Data ’ on 26th and 27th September 2011 at the Intercontinental hotel, Nairobi, Kenya.

The workshop brings together agriculture and monitoring and evaluation experts from Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Burundi, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Rwanda. Participants will share their experiences on integrating gender in monitoring and evaluation, and go through the process of engendering the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) monitoring and evaluation framework, collecting, analyzing and reporting gender and agriculture data.

Jemimah Njuki from PGI and one of the presenters at the workshop says one of the constraints to integrating gender in agriculture development is the lack of gender disaggregated data on agriculture investments and how gender influences agriculture productivity and growth in the region. This workshop is an important step in developing capacities in the region to collect this data and make it available to policy makers for planning.

 

Gender Equity and Development Report 2012

The recently World Bank development reports that ‘the lives of girls and women have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. The pace of change has been astonishing in some areas, but in others, progress toward gender equality has been limited—even in developed countries.

‘This year’s World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development argues that gender equality is a core development objective in its own right. It is also smart economics. Greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and make institutions more representative.

• Productivity gains. Women now represent 40 percent of the global labor force, 43 percent of the world’s agricultural labor force, and more than half the world’s university students. Productivity will be raised if their skills and talents are used more fully. For example, if women farmers were to have the same access as men to fertilizers and other inputs, maize yields would increase by almost one-sixth in Malawi and Ghana. And eliminating barriers that discriminate against women working in certain sectors or occupations could increase labor productivity by as much as 25 percent in some countries.
•  Improved outcomes for the next generation. Greater control over household resources by women can enhance countries’ growth prospects by changing spending patterns in ways that benefit children. And improvements in women’s education and health have been linked to better outcomes for their children in countries as varied as Brazil, Nepal, Pakistan, and Senegal.
•  More representative decision making. Gender equality matters for society more broadly. Empowering women as economic, political, and social actors can change policy choices and make institutions more representative of a range of voices. In India, giving power to women at the local level led to increases in the provision of public goods, such as water and sanitation, which mattered more to women.

‘The Report also focuses on four priority areas for policy going forward: (i) reducing excess female mortality and closing education gaps where they remain, (ii) improving access to economic opportunities for women (iii) increasing women’s voice and agency in the household and in society and (iv) limiting the reproduction of gender inequality across generations.’

The guide which has nine chapters in three parts:

• Part I Taking stock of gender equality
• Part II What has driven progress? What impedes it?
• Part III The role of and potential for public action

Can be downloaded from the below links:

World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development

WRD 2012: Gender Equality and Development