One of the Feed the Future Advancing Women's Empowerment (AWE) Program's key learning topics is identifying and assessing the impact of good practices for women’s empowerment in beyond-production activities. To better comprehend the gender gap, the AWE team conducted a landscape analysis on the nature, scope and scale of women’s empowerment in beyond-production interventions, and also how outcomes are monitored, analyzed, and reported. The analysis explored three questions:

1. Are Feed the Future efforts in beyond-production activities affecting women’s empowerment? 

2. How are Feed the Future efforts in beyond-production activities affecting women’s empowerment? 

3. What are some opportunities and practices to increase women’s participation in and returns from higher-value activities in agribusiness or employment? 

The analysis presents key findings and recommendations on building the evidence base on which beyond-production interventions are most effective at promoting women's empowerment, closing gender gaps, or promoting female participation, and benefit in beyond-production activities. The key discoveries were:

FINDING 1: Some of the reviewed projects had broad scopes, while others worked exclusively in beyond-production nodes.  

FINDING 2: A majority of reviewed projects developed gender mainstreaming strategies to guide beyond-production activities.  

FINDING 3: Projects implemented a wide range of beyond-production activities to support and engage women.  

FINDING 4: Projects often adapted beyond-production activities by seeking ways to increase women's participation. 

FINDING 5: Projects adapted approaches to enable women to access credit to invest in beyond-production livelihood opportunities. 

FINDING 6: Beyond-production approaches that targeted youth were able to achieve gender balance in integrated interventions. 

FINDING 7: Beyond-production indicators rarely captured gender-differentiated impact data or information about women’s empowerment. 

FINDING 8: Few projects used targeted indicators to measure progress or impacts of gender-specific or women’s empowerment-focused beyond-production work.   

FINDING 9: The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) was designed to focus on agricultural production, and therefore, was not an effective tool for measuring women’s empowerment in beyond-production activities.  

Read the full landscape analysis to learn more!