The goal of the Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) Program is to advance women’s empowerment through research, compilation of best practices and the creation of practical tools that guide development professionals to design and implement programs that strengthen gender equity and social inclusion.

Over the past five years, AWE has created an array of tools, reports, how-to notes, best practices and lessons learned. Our goal was to give development professionals examples, ideas and pathways to put equitable and inclusive development into practice. Key resources are discussed below.

For USAID/Ghana, AWE developed the USAID/Ghana Women’s Empowerment to Food Security and Youth Assessment (fiscal year (FY) 2019), which informed the development of USAID/Ghana’s upcoming five-year Global Food Security Strategy Project Appraisal Document and subsequent activities, identifying and prioritizing six core behaviors that can encourage or hinder women’s and youths’ engagement and empowerment in food security, agriculture and nutrition-sensitive programming.

For USAID’s Innovation Labs, AWE developed the Gender Integration in USAID’s Agricultural Research Investments: A Synthesis of Key Findings and Best Practices report (FY 2020), which identified tools and examples of gender integration in research among 20 USAID-supported agriculture and food security research activities and was accompanied by four case studies to inform best practices.

To increase understanding of the nature, scope and scale of women’s participation, benefit and empowerment in beyond production interventions (e.g., in agro-processing, retail, trade, inputs, financial service provision and transport and logistics), AWE conducted a Good Practices for Women’s Empowerment in Beyond Production Agriculture Interventions: A Gendered Landscape Analysis (FY 2020).

AWE developed a Youth, Women and Market Systems Development in Agriculture and Supporting Markets: Landscape Analysis and Case Studies Report (FY 2020) to identify strategies to better integrate women and youth into agriculture and market systems programs.

To support USAID Mission staff and stakeholders in agriculture and market systems development programs in better identifying and implementing actions to address gender-based violence where it arises in their programming, AWE developed the Toolkit to Address Gender-Based Violence in Agriculture and Market Systems Development and other resources (FY 2021).

AWE developed the Increasing Women’s Roles in Agricultural Decision-Making Report (FY 2021), as well as “how to” guides to support USAID Missions and implementing partners to enhance women’s decision-making power in their programming by providing evidence of specific programmatic approaches and their outcomes, as well as methodologies and metrics by which to measure women’s decision-making.

AWE’s Digital Finance and Women’s Economic Empowerment in Beyond Production Roles in Agriculture and Food Systems Report and menu of tools (FY 2022), as well as two case studies, address knowledge gaps on how agriculture and food systems programs can address women’s financial exclusion through accessible and useful financial platforms and promote economic empowerment.

In Bangladesh, AWE undertook a gender analysis of the USAID/Bangladesh Feed the Future portfolio (FY 2023) to support the Mission in designing future programming.

AWE created a library with resources that are practical, pertinent and realistic for the opportunities and challenges faced by agriculture and market and food systems programs. Each section of our library contains AWE-developed products, such as reports, compilations of best practices, interviews, case studies and examples, and a compilation of external resources that leads you to web pages and reports that we found most useful. The library also includes the AWE newsletters, which contain a tools section for each topic. The newsletters contain more than 400 additional resources. It is our hope that this library becomes the go-to place for women’s empowerment in agriculture.