This summer, I will be working under PhD candidate Jennifer Zavaleta, studying the livelihoods and climate adaptation of Indian farmers. I was fortunate enough to work with Jennifer on this project this past school year. This summer will be a little different, however, because I will be focused on the specific impact women have on their family’s well being as well as coding the data to the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index.
So what is the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (or WEAI) anyway? I’m glad you asked. The WEAI is a “survey based index that was created to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector” (The Hunger Project). Women are crucial to the process of growing and producing the world’s food, as well as feeding their families, and this index allows research institutions to measure the success of agricultural women’s empowerment programs.
My research is using this index to measure and compare the empowerment of women in various rural, rain-fed regions of India. To use the index, I will be taking the answers to different survey questions and using WEAI’s formula for adding them together and weighing their importance. The index is important because it allows researchers all over the world to measure something as abstract as women’s empowerment in a standardized way.
Hopefully, this research will allow a comparison of women’s empowerment across different agricultural regions of India, so we can make hypothesis about what leads a certain region to have more empowered women. And because women are often responsible for meeting the nutritional needs of their families (The Hunger Project), determining what makes areas more empowering is crucial to increasing the empowerment of women and hopefully achieving the end of world hunger.
[su_quote cite=”The Hunger Project”]”Studies show that when women are empowered, all of society benefits.”[/su_quote]
Sources and Further Reading:
[su_document url=”https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/wagsfp/wp-content/uploads/sites/61/2018/06/IFPRI-Womens-empowerment-in-agriculture-index.pdf”]
[su_document url=”https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/wagsfp/wp-content/uploads/sites/61/2018/06/Hunger-Project-the-womens-empowerment-index.pdf”]
[su_document url=”https://courses.lsa.umich.edu/wagsfp/wp-content/uploads/sites/61/2018/06/Alkire-2012-womens-empowerment-in-agriculture-index.pdf”]
This is really awesome, I’d love to hear more about this over the summer