The Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index

Abstract

The empowerment of women in the livestock sector is fundamental to achieve gender equality. It also is instrumental for increased household productivity and improved household health and nutrition. Diverse strategies exist to empower women, yet these strategies are difficult to prioritize without a reliable and adapted means to measure women's empowerment. One quantitative measure is the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Despite its reliability in certain agricultural contexts, the WEAI requires adaptation in settings where livestock farming is the dominant form of livelihood. Using the WEAI as a starting point, a multidisciplinary team of researchers developed the Women's Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI), a new index to assess the empowerment of women in the livestock sector. This paper presents the WELI and the dimensions of empowerment it includes: (1) decisions about agricultural production; (2) decisions related to nutrition; (3) access to and control over resources; (4) control and use of income; (5) access to and control of opportunities; and (6) workload and control over own time. The paper illustrates the use of the WELI by introducing pilot findings from dairy smallholders in four districts of northern Tanzania. The paper addresses considerations for the appropriate use and adaptation of the WELI to balance the needs for context specificity and crosscultural comparisons; it also discusses its limitations. The paper recommends participatory and qualitative methods that are complementary to the WELI to provide context-specific insights on the processes of women's empowerment in the livestock sector.

Use of the infection and treatment method in the control of East Coast fever in Kenya: does gender matter for adoption and impact?

“…The adoption of ITM has led to some intra-household gender dynamics that have adversely affected women. Workload and control over income are critical indicators of gender equity in the livestock sector (Gali e et al, 2019). Considering that women are the primary caregivers of cattle as demonstrated in this study and other studies conducted in sub-Saharan Africa (Galie et al, 2017;GALVmed, 2011;Yisehak, 2008), an increase in herd size due to a reduction in cattle mortality among ITM adopters has increased women's workload.…”

Gendered reporting of household dynamics in the Kenyan dairy sector: trends and implications for low emissions dairy development

“…This would better capture the nuances of household decision-making, and potentially account for the issue of gender respondent bias. This type of scale has been integrated in gender and agricultural research using the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) (Alkire et al, 2013;Sraboni, Quisumbing, & Ahmed, 2013), as well as the Women's Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI) (Galie, 2017).…”

Intensifying Inequality? Gendered Trends in Commercializing and Diversifying Smallholder Farming Systems in East Africa

“…Although the potential for female disenfranchisement in increasing commercialization and market orientation has been documented across a wide array of commodities and farming activities (Anderson et al, 2012;Njuki and Sanginga, 2013;Silvestri et al, 2015;Forsythe et al, 2016;Tavenner et al, 2018), robust statistical analysis of standardized indicators across farming systems investigating these relationships are severely lacking. This scarcity is noticeable considering the demand at the global policy level for generating gender equitable and socially inclusive development outcomes for the world's smallholder farmers (notable standardized indicators include the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) (Malapit et al, 2015), the Women's Empowerment in Livestock Index (Galiè et al, 2018), and the CCAFS Gender and Climate Change Survey (Bryan et al, 2018). Moreover, the issues of gender respondent bias and the social phenomenon of gendered reporting have also been largely ignored in quantitative agricultural and livestock studies, with a few exceptions (Deere et al, 2012;Twyman et al, 2015;Tavenner et al, 2018).…”