Women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labor force globally, with a large and growing share involved in agricultural production (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2015). Approaches to promoting women’s economic empowerment in agriculture have traditionally focused on meeting women where they are and enhancing their roles in production-related activities to achieve scale. More recently, however, agriculture market systems projects are understanding the need to look at entry points for women beyond production, such as their roles in inputs and agricultural services, processing, marketing, and retail sales. These roles can offer women equal or better economic empowerment opportunities than production while also challenging ingrained norms about the roles men and women can play in agriculture. 

What does advancing women’s empowerment in beyond production activities have to do with the new U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security?

The recently released U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security outlines a vision where every person has equitable opportunity for job placement, advancement, quality of life and leadership to reach their full economic potential. Beyond-production roles are critical to achieving this vision. This involves recognizing and working to change the persistent social and gender norms and biases that relegate women to lower paid and lower quality on-farm work. It involves addressing occupational segregation and unequal access to higher-paid and quality jobs off-farm. It also requires looking at a range of sub-systems like care infrastructure, entrepreneurial support services and broader policy and regulatory environments that directly inhibit or facilitate women’s empowerment through beyond production roles. 

So, how do we achieve this in practice? Feed the Future Advancing Women's Empowerment (AWE) Program has conducted a series of learning initiatives ranging from landscape analyses to impact assessments looking at how agriculture beyond production can be important catalysts for advancing women’s empowerment. Below are key learning points from these initiatives that can directly help advance the four priority lines of effort in the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security. 

“How to": 1) Promote Economic Competitiveness through Well-Paying Quality Jobs and

3) Promote Entrepreneurship and Financial and Digital Inclusion

Learning 1: While increased income from beyond production can lead to economic advancement, this does not automatically result in advancing women’s empowerment and economic security. 

An impact assessment of the Feed the Future Malawi Agriculture Diversification (AgDiv) Activity’s soy kit intervention found that improving access to economic opportunities beyond production is not sufficient on its own, and that changes in agency, norms and power relations must be present to lead to empowerment outcomes for women. AgDiv found that using an integrated approach to enhance women’s access to resources (e.g., skills, training, finance, networks and equipment) and redefine gender norms and roles (e.g., promote women in non-traditional roles, challenge the distribution of resources and duties between women and men) led to greater women’s empowerment and economic security outcomes. The impact assessment showed clear evidence of shifts in intra-household and business-related decision-making, women’s household positions, and women’s overall feelings of self-esteem and self-efficacy. These findings highlight the interconnectedness between empowerment domains and the impact of household dynamics within other spheres, including how improving women’s roles within the household can expand opportunities outside the household. 

Learning 2: To advance women’s positions in beyond production, we need to look beyond participation to include increasing equitable access to services, productive resources and capacity-strengthening opportunities. 

In an AWE landscape analysis on beyond production, nearly all projects reported needing to design and implement interventions targeted to women’s needs and constraints to allow them to participate on equitable footing in beyond-production roles. These interventions ranged from addressing women’s specific mobility constraints to promoting equitable access to finance. As an example, agent banking models in Bangladesh help overcome women's mobility constraints by bringing banking services closer to them and hiring more female agents leads to better outreach with female customers. As a result of these types of models, women hold 43 percent of the agent banking accounts in Bangladesh. While not surprising, this finding reinforces the need to combine efforts to increase women’s participation in beyond production with targeted interventions ensuring women have the proper support to succeed in these roles, including addressing structural barriers. 

Learning 3: Sector selection and looking at the full range of market functions are important when considering where and how to upgrade women’s roles in beyond production.

In an AWE report on women’s and youth’s inclusion in agricultural market systems, we found that selecting the right sectors to achieve outcomes for men and women is very important. This process requires going beyond sectors where men and women already have high participation to look at end markets and value chain upgrades that can offer role expansion and greater market inclusion of women. Even if scale is limited at first, projects noted the potential for multiplier effects, where positioning women as new entrants can catalyze recruitment of more women into these roles or enhance services or products to women consumers over time. One project used a role change framework to help Activity staff and partners understand sector-specific opportunities that relate to women’s advancement into upgraded roles or functions.

“How to":  2) Advance Care Infrastructure and Value Domestic Work and 

4) Dismantle Systemic Barriers to Women’s Participation

Learning 4: Beyond production approaches introduce risks that need to be accounted for and mitigated.

Gender-related risks associated with beyond-production activities was a common theme across the learning initiatives mentioned above. Risks included male takeover, increased time and labor burdens without reductions in care work, and gender-based violence risks, especially in industries, sectors and roles with fewer female entrants. Suggestions for how to address risks include developing risk mitigation plans; identifying early markers of most acute risks; developing early detection, reporting, and referral systems; and sensitizing and strengthening the capacity of partners to identify and respond to risks. 

Learning 5: Consistent and strategic collection and use of data is needed to: 1) fully understand women’s empowerment outcomes, and 2) prove the business case for upgrading women’s roles beyond production.

Measuring outcomes of beyond-production activities on women’s empowerment in dynamic agricultural market systems is challenging, especially when women’s roles can progress and regress in a non-linear fashion over time. It requires qualitative and quantitative indicators and data collection methods and expanding into more complexity-aware methods that can make sense of complex change processes and monitor for negative, unintended outcomes. Additionally, data, figures and clear results proving the benefit of women’s upgraded roles can influence the attitudes and behaviors of market actors, program participants and Activity staff. Widely disseminating and discussing this information with partners can generate curiosity and influence them to promote more inclusive business models that expand women’s roles and advance women’s economic security.

Interested in Engaging AWE? 

Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) provides targeted technical assistance to Missions, implementing partners, the USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, and other USAID offices to increase women’s participation, productivity, profit, and benefit in agricultural systems. See the many benefits we offer missions around the world here. 

Contact: USAID/RFS COR Aslihan Kes ([email protected]) or AWE Team Lead Samantha Croasdaile ([email protected]) for more information.