Presented by Elizabeth Waithanji at the "Expanding Livelihood Opportunities for Poor Households Initiative in East Africa (ELOPHI)" Sharing Forum at the Crown Plaza Hotel Nairobi, 20 August 2013

1. 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

2. 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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3. 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
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4. Impact Pathway – addressing and measuring change (GTD)
Women become more empowered and gender empowerment gap is reduced
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
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.
2.
Document and
disseminate results
Develop a strategy to
enhance women’s
empowerment in
development projects
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5. Scale up strategy

6. 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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7. Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI)
Adapted from Alkire et al 2012 by Waithanji et al forth coming
Schematic representation of
the six dimension WEAI
The 1st Sub-Index: THE SIX DOMAINS
OF EMPOWERMENT (6DE)
1
DOMAIN
Production
2
Resources
3
4
Income
Leadership
5
Time
6* Health
INDICATORS
Input in productive decisions
Autonomy in production
Ownership of assets
Purchase, sale, or transfer of assets
Access to and decisions on credit
Control over use of income
Group membership
Speaking in public
Workload
Leisure
Decision making on reproductive
health
Vulnerability to gender based
violence
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8. Dissemination: WEAI Results
0.35
GBV attitudes
Reproductive health
DISEMPOWERMENT INDEX (M0=1-6DE)
0.3
Work distribution
0.25
Leisure
0.2
Identity card
Speaking in public
0.15
Group membership
0.1
0.05
Taken loan
Women
Men
Women
Men
0
Not taken
loan
Waithanji et al forth coming
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
Control over use of
income
Access to and
decisions on credit
Purchase or sale of
assets
Ownership of assets
Autonomy in
production
Input in productive
decisions
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/ILRI/weai-evaluating-impacts
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9. Feedback Questions – from sharing forums
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?
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10. 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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11. 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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12. 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
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13. 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)
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14. 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
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15. Activities towards dissemination
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16. 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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17. 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
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18. 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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19. 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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20. Thank You!
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