Conspect On Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index
Power is gendered (Pratto and Walker, 2004; Pratto et al., 2011) and for the great many years, men have on average had access to the greater power (Brown, 1991; UNDP, 2015). The reparation process will be one that requires time and not just some immediate one-side-fits-all solution (Huis et al., 2017). This proposed time-based reparation process is one that is predicated on so many things. Key amongst which is a pedagogical process. UNESCO (2014) reported that for low-income nations, only 20% had achieved gender parity in primary education. Also, out of the 774 million illiterate adults in the world, 60% were still women in 2011. But education is not the only factor that can elicit gender inequality within a population and thus the necessity for indexes that capture the true status of equality the within the said population.
The tragedy of the commons, I believe, is one of the most under-utilized theories especially in sociological analysis and interpretation. To have one understand what Women empowerment is and the need for measuring indexes, I will use the tragedy of the commons to explain the problem statement. For any given society, there are limited resources. These resources enable members of that society to achieve their define objectives. In an ideal system, members of this society must take only what is sufficient for them and leave enough for other to also satisfy their needs or wants-EQUITY. In reality however, some members of that society plunge more than necessary because they are in a “position of power” — INEQUALITY. The problem however is that the plunder by the few creates negatives consequences that must be borne by all the members of the society and even worse, the members who had no part in the use of these resources suffer the most- Social Differentiation and Discrimination. By this analogy, we understand that men are the plunderers and women suffer for it.
The question therefore is, what would the empowerment of women look like? It would mean that women are given equal access to these resources to become active-capable agents who are able to attain their achievements (Kabeer, 1999). But the progress of this empowerment must be measurable and assessable yet it also poses a great deal of problem as the indexes of measurement have been nebulous. The WEAI was launched in 2012 and it has been massive in terms of contribution to methodologies in understanding women empowerment. It offers a more practical approach to assessing the stages of women empowerment. The assessment criteria so far are;
HOUSEHOLD DECISION MAKING: Najjar et al. 2019 confirms in their research in Morocco that when men are educated on the need to involve women in decision making, it increases the agricultural productivity. The structure of most cultures are setup in such a way that men are the decision makers albeit enquiring from men and women yield different answers (Ambler et al., forthcoming). The question of who is more likely to make a decision is also predicated on answering who has access to information. For example, GSM research shows that women are 30% less likely to own a mobile phone in Africa. This means men are in pole position to receive most useful information than women. The information asymmetry of who makes the decision in households is therefore clarified that men are in the driving seats. Empowerment in this area will therefore mean giving women access to accurate, relevant and timely information that allows them to formulate strategies that makes them agents for obtaining their objectives.
ASSET OWNERSHIP: The ability and capacity to own assets in a community is a good indicator of how empowered women are in a community. The access to the means of acquiring property is also equally important as the ability to own the assets. In developing countries especially, the culture discriminates against the ownership of property by women. The research of Huis et al (2017) shows how less impactful access to the means (microfinance in this case) of acquiring asset has been on women.
TENURE SECURITY: Research from Heidemann et al (2018) on one of the land grabbing for example shows how delicate women’s right to own an asset like land are. A woman’s land is more likely to be grabbed by forced sales by parastatals and more concerningly even by their own partners. This is to say that empowering women must come with the protection and security of assets like land by ticking boxes like completeness of bundle rights, duration of rights, robustness of rights and nature of ownership
RESPONDENT SELECTION: As it has already been mentioned, there has been an information asymmetry with regards to asking the question of feeling empowered. Men and women seem to give different answers. It is important to notice the lack of concordance here.
COGNITIVE INTERVIEWING: One of the problems of empowerment has been how its “definition” has differed across many cultures. What it is to be empowered has been found to be understood differently in different cultures. Willis (2005) proposes the need to have a proper qualitative structure that translates abstracts into locally understandable languages. This way participants understand what is been asked and measure thereby preventing errors.
TIME USE SURVEYS: Seymour et al., 2019 constructed the time and income poverty measures so we can understand how these two measure have obstructed the capacity to attain better nutrition. The results could not conclude such hypothesis and that is probably because of the ill-definition of poverty used for a factor like time. But other research works show how time poverty has affected what achievements can strategize for as they spend on average 11 hours a day for unpaid labor
In conclusion, the WEAI is one of the key achievements in the attainment for women empowerment. There are several other indexes that must be considered and also have a more larger application of these indexes to finding solutions. Huis et al, 2017 does offer an olive branch in this regard with the three-dimensional model and that can be a great application point to start from.
