International Women’s Day, 2022 – How Bangladesh became a test case for women’s empowerment – Global issues
WASHINGTON DC, March 7 (IPS) – The increase in rural women’s empowerment in Bangladesh over the past 10 years is no accident.
A decade ago, not even one of four Rural women can be said to be “empowered” on five key indicators, a number that surprises even the country’s poorest grassroots workers. By 2015, this had increased to more than two-fifths, or 41 percent, with a steady increase in recent years.
A major reason for this increase is a systematic attempt to measure rural women’s empowerment in real terms using measurements directly related to their daily lives. , including agriculture and fishing.
The findings are a wake up has guided and driven action towards a more targeted approach to improve women’s participation and decision making in food systems.
The result is not only greater gender parity, but subsequent improvements in nutrition, health and productivity. And while the gender gap is gradually closing, Bangladesh has achieved lower average income statuswith reductions in extreme poverty, as well as in child and maternal mortality.
Clearly, for women around the world, there is still a long way to go. But as Bangladesh has demonstrated, unlocking the many benefits that gender equality can bring begins with first quantifying the level of empowerment and gender equality between rural women and their communities. In this case, the researchers deployed a pioneering tool, the Women in Agriculture Empowerment Index (WEAI).
Bangladesh became the first country to conduct a national household survey that included WEAI in 2012. One component of the index provides the first measure of women’s empowerment across five key areas: decisions about agricultural production; access and decision-making power about agricultural resources; control the use of income; leadership in the community and allocating time.
In addition, another component measures gender equality, or the percentage of women who are empowered or perform at least as well as men in their households. This allows women’s empowerment to be a test of agricultural productivity, nutritional status and public health.
The publicly available data is instrumental to demonstrate the scale of gender inequality in Bangladesh as well as to show disparities in empowerment within the country. And this information also supports the second step, which is to inspire government-backed programs that address the interlinkages between women, agriculture and food security.
Linking Agriculture, Nutrition and Gender (Angel) program, designed in partnership with Bangladesh’s Ministry of Agriculture, training in agriculture, nutrition behavior change communication, and gender-sensitive training in Bangladesh from 2015 to 2018.
These trainings not only positively impact women’s empowerment by up to 13 percentage points, but the program also increased the production of crops other than rice and improved the quality of households’ diets. The ANGeL program has since been rolled out nationwide.
To date, WEAI has created several different versions, some including more extensive indicators and others less, to meet the needs of more than 200 institutions in 58 countries.
But adopted on a global level, supported by CGIARTools like WEAI can provide a common metric to help design policies to meet a variety of goals, from improving diets and early childhood development to increasing women’s livelihoods.
If more countries, governments and other agencies use WEAI, or the like, to guide policy and investment decisions, women’s empowerment can be leveraged as a gateway to a better world. healthier, more inclusive and equitable world.
When performance is measured, performance is improved, but when performance can also be directly compared across different countries, regions and production systems, the results can be accelerated by inspire a race to the top. This is why CGIAR is working to harmonize different tools to enable progress worldwide to be more widely tracked and stimulated.
Governments also have an important role to play in investing in the collection and reporting of empowerment indicators and working alongside development partners to act on their insights.
The more policymakers and researchers know about the extent of gender inequality and its broader role in people’s health and well-being, the more governments, researchers, and communities will have. and NGOs can take targeted and effective actions to address global challenges at the root.
Empowering women in agriculture leads to more diverse in food production and household rations, and, in many countries, in the long-term nutritional status of children. With a consistent approach that first reveals and then closes the women’s empowerment gap, everyone benefits.
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© Inter Press Service (2022) – All rights reservedOrigin: Inter Press Service
