HER+ Initiative dissects women’s empowerment and climate resilience in West Bengal using Pro-WEAI

(04 December 2024) - Under the CGIAR Gender Impact Platform's Methods Module, the CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality (HER+) was granted USD100,000 to apply and scale the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and similar tools and metrics to their climate change research.

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WEAI was originally developed for Feed the Future, a US government initiative that aims to address global hunger and food insecurity. It has two sub-indices: the 5 Domains of Empowerment (5DE) and the Gender Parity Index (GPI). The five domains, namely: Production, Resources, Income, Leadership, and Time, measure the level of empowerment of a woman inside the household and in their community. On the other hand, GPI identifies gender gaps in a house by measuring the percentage of women who are as empowered as the men who live within the same household.

HER+ presented its initial findings on the use of project-level WEAI (Pro-WEAI), an iteration of WEAI that is used to measure women's empowerment at the project level. Work Package 2 - EMPOWER of HER+ Initiative, together with Sattva Consulting, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Indian Veterinary Research Institute (ICAR-IVRI), and other nongovernment organization partners implemented this project in two districts of West Bengal, India.

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The project developed and implemented socio-technical innovation bundles (STIBs), a suite of social, technical, and technological innovations tailored to the needs and priorities of the local communities, through multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary engagement and learning hubs called learning labs. The learning lab communities were primarily made up of women small livestock entrepreneurs growing goats and poultry.

HER+ and partners formed these learning labs to implement STIBs to improve women's climate resilience and empowerment and make them part of solutions, not only the victims of climate change. The Pro-WEAI tool was used to collect baseline data in the project locations. In the webinar, the team shared some key findings and insights from their experience of using the tool.

Here are some of their key reflections:

• Women have high access to financial mechanisms, but in reality, access to finance and freedom to utilize funds are two different issues.
  This indicator states that women can comfortably and securely access their money. While this may be a good level of financial freedom, context says otherwise. "In India, many women own a bank account because most of the government schemes or access to their schemes are collected or linked to those bank accounts.", explained Sattva Consulting Senior Consultant Harsha Jain. "Having a bank account is easy [for women], but using those services is another conversation altogether."
  
• Qualitative consultations provided nuance to the grades per indicator.
  Similar to the prior point, qualitative answers showed the importance of being context-specific when delivering innovations to communities. For example, the perception of empowerment in the villages may be entirely different compared to how it is defined in original publications."The qualitative insights also gave us an understanding of what is the perception of empowerment or an empowered man and women in these communities. It also showed us the restrictive conditions that women have to face… compared to men, when trying to achieve empowerment.", Harsha elaborated.
  
• The community's climate resilience influences the women's climate resilience
  The two learning lab locations are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events, but they do have disaster risk reduction plans at the national and district levels. However, the knowledge, awareness, and understanding at the community level are low. Therefore, the villagers are unprepared for disasters, making it difficult for them to easily recuperate from the impacts of the disasters. Similar to the other projects that received the grant, the HER+ team noted that resilience is a primary concern for the community rather than just the individual.

The team is looking into conducting an end-line implementation of the pro-WEAI tool to see if the results remain consistent regarding the tool's application. It also wants to analyze the effectiveness of STIB as an adaptive, inclusive, and integrated approach for scaling. Furthermore, the HER+ team hopes to build a connection between climate resilience and women's empowerment in later analyses.

WATCH the full webinar HER+ team's full presentation here.
LEARN MORE about the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index tool here.