Presenters:

Marie Ruel, Director of Poverty, Health and Nutrition, IFPRI

The pro-WEAI is a new survey-based index that builds on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and is adapted for project use with a closer focus on aspects of empowerment related to health and nutrition. The index is being developed by IFPRI’s Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a learning and capacity-building initiative working with 13 agricultural development projects, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Feed the Future (led by USAID), and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).

The GAAP2 team will introduce the latest version of the pro-WEAI as a measure of women’s empowerment and orient potential users to the WEAI Resource Center. Panelists representing organizations that are potential users of pro-WEAI will discuss how the tool can support knowledge management in their projects. The discussion will also solicit feedback from the broader development community, including donors, NGOs, and the private sector, about pro-WEAI’s usefulness in promoting women’s empowerment in agricultural projects and as part of national statistical surveys, and further discuss what policy implications can be derived from these analyses.