Monitoring progress toward women’s empowerment requires tools that reflect its underlying concepts. Cognitive interviewing is a qualitative approach for identifying sources of error in how respondents respond to survey items. This study identifies cognitive errors in survey modules included in the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index for Market Inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) in Benin and Malawi. Comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and response errors were all found to different degrees in the nine modules comprising the survey instrument. There are variations in findings by country context and, to a lesser extent, gender. The findings of this study informed revisions to the pro-WEAI+MI survey instrument and offer insights into how best to design survey modules used for monitoring progress toward gender equality in agricultural value chains and development efforts.

Improving social assistance programs is imperative to addressing problems of poverty and vulnerability in Malawi. Emergency aid has played an important role in alleviating hunger during humanitarian crises such as those in 2015-16 and 2016-17. However, the Government of Malawi and development partners recognize that emergency responses are not a sustainable solution to address vulnerability. This qualitative study examines the characteristics of resilient households and perceived effects of programs to improve food security and resilience from the perspectives of the beneficiaries and communities they serve. This beneficiary-centered approach explores socially-defined concepts of resilience, associated coping strategies, norms and political dynamics affecting programs. These findings can provide useful insights to improve the effectiveness of social assistance programs in this context.

In July 2016, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and partners launched a three-year evidence-based policy support project to analyze demand for and supply of agricultural extension services in Malawi and help design activities to strengthen service providers’ capacity to address farmers’ demands for information. For this project, IFPRI partnered with Wadonda Consult and the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) to conduct the household survey and qualitative interviews. Funding came from the Government of Flanders, the U.S. Agency for International Development through the Strengthening Agricultural and Nutrition Extension (SANE), the German Agency for International Cooperation [GIZ]), and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). The project collected two rounds of nationally representative panel data of 2,880 households (2016 and 2018), two rounds of focus group discussions (FGDs), census of extension service providers in 15 districts, and a series of in-depth interviews. This note summarizes the main findings from 10 reports completed to analyze and draw conclusions from the stories behind these datasets.

Inclusive agricultural value chains (VCs) are potential drivers for poverty reduction, food security, and women’s empowerment. This report assesses the implementation of the Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education Training for Women Program (ATVET4Women) that aims to support women with vocational training and market linkages in priority agricultural value chains. This report focuses on Malawi, one of the six pilot countries of the ATVET4Women; and focuses on vegetable value chains in which some non-formal training sessions have been conducted as of October 2019. This report presents (1) program experience of stakeholders; (2) evidence of program benefits and challenges among ATVET4Women non-formal training graduates; and (3) baseline data on value chain and empowerment indicators, using a pilot household survey-based instrument for measuring women’s empowerment in agricultural value chains (pro-WEAI for market inclusion) and supplementary qualitative research. Results show graduates’ satisfaction and appreciation of the training provided, and some graduates reported having access to more lucrative markets as a result of the training. However, positive changes in several outcome indicators were reported by only some graduates: 30 percent of graduates reported increased production and sales. There is no significant difference in the reported changes and levels of vegetable production and income between graduates and non-graduates. Qualitative findings suggest that constraints to accessing agricultural inputs and funds to upgrade their production may be why there are no measured differences. Results on empowerment status reveal that 73 percent of women and 85 percent of men in the sample are empowered, and 73 percent of the sample households achieved gender parity. The main contributor of disempowerment among women and men is lack of work balance and autonomy in income. Fewer women achieved adequacy in work balance than men. Adequacies in attitudes about domestic violence, respect among household members, input in productive decisions, and asset ownership are generally high for both women and men, but significantly lower for women. While this report is mainly descriptive and further analysis is ongoing, it offers some lessons and practical implications for improving ATVET4Women program implementation and its outcomes on women’s market access, incomes, and empowerment.

This brief summarizes the recent assessment of the implementation of the Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education Training for Women Program (ATVET4Women) that aims to support women and their families with vocational training and market linkages in priority agricultural value chains (VCs). The ATVET4Women program has two main components: formal training and nonformal training. Formal training consists of a 2- or 3-year vocational and technical course at an agricultural training center (ATC) where students gain skills (and a diploma) for employment or entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector. Nonformal training provides farmers with 1 to 3 weeks of training on good production and business management practices.

The study assesses the effect of interactive radio programming on women’s empowerment and agricultural development, employing nationally representative household panel data and qualitative interviews in Malawi. Four major findings can be highlighted. First, radio programming is the preferred source of agricultural and nutrition advice among many subpopulations: younger women and men used radio more than other sources for their agricultural information needs, while younger and older men used radio more than other sources for nutrition education. Second, results show a positive impact of radio programming on technology awareness but a limited impact on actual adoption of most agricultural practices being promoted, except crop residue incorporation. Third, results show positive impacts on dietary diversity and adoption of other nutrition practices among the rural population. Fourth, results show a strong association between access to interactive radio programming and women’s and men’s empowerment scores. The association is greater for women’s empowerment and younger men’s empowerment, the latter being the most disempowered group in the sample.

Many development agencies design and implement interventions that aim to reach, benefit, and empower rural women across the value chain in activities ranging from production, to processing, to marketing. Determining whether and how such interventions empower women, as well as the constraints faced by different value chain actors, requires quantitative and qualitative tools. We describe how we adapted the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI), a mixed-methods tool for studying empowerment in development projects, to include aspects of agency relevant for multiple types of value chain actors. The resulting pro-WEAI for market inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) includes quantitative and qualitative instruments developed over the course of four studies. Studies in the Philippines (2017), Bangladesh (2017), and Malawi (2019) were intended to diagnose areas of disempowerment to inform programming, whereas the Benin (2019) study was an impact assessment of an agricultural training program. The pro-WEAI+MI includes all indicators included in pro-WEAI, plus a dashboard of complementary indicators and recommended qualitative instruments. These tools investigate the empowerment of women in different value chains and nodes and identify barriers to market access and inclusion that may restrict empowerment for different value chain actors. Our findings highlight three lessons. First, the sampling strategy needs to be designed to capture the key actors in a value chain. Second, the market inclusion indicators cannot stand alone; they must be interpreted alongside the core pro-WEAI indicators. Third, not all market inclusion indicators will be relevant for all value chains and contexts. Users should research the experiences of women and men in the target value chains in the context of the programto select priority market inclusion indicators.

Low-cost and sustainable agricultural management practices are being promoted in many countries but continue to face low adoption among farmers. We tracked the awareness and adoption among farmers of a number of practices―soil cover, minimum tillage, crop rotation, intercropping, crop diversification, crop residue incorporation, pit planting, water harvesting, and organic fertilizer―in two rounds of a nationally representative rural household survey in Malawi. Survey data and focus group discussions are used to understand the factors explaining the variations in farmers’ awareness and adoption of these practices. Results show a strong positive effect of extension services receipt on farmers’ awareness of these practices but no effect on farmers’ adoption of most of the practices being promoted, except for crop residue incorporation and organic fertilizer use. Receipt of input subsidy does not influence the adoption of these practices. Both survey data and focus group discussions highlight the need for intensive and iterative engagement between service providers and farmers to fully communicate, learn, and adapt to these management practices.

Following poor harvests in the 2015/16 cropping season in Malawi, vulnerability assessments found that nearly 6.7 million people, primarily in the Southern and Central regions, were likely to suffer from food insecurity before the next harvest. The government of Malawi and its development partners designed the 2016/17 Food Insecurity Response Programme (FIRP) in Malawi to meet the food needs of many of the households affected, mobilizing approximately USD 265 million in resources to do so. In the wake of this intervention, a team led by the International Food Policy Research Institute was contracted to assess the quality of this humanitarian response along four primary dimension: Assess the quality of the national food security assessments which began the response; Investigate the accuracy of the geographical and beneficiary targeting within selected areas; conduct an operational assessment of the humanitarian response design and implementation; and Assess overall programme and draw technical, market, and methodological implications for the design of future humanitarian responses and their contribution to resilience building. This Discussion Paper provides considerable detail on which facets of the implementation of FIRP were successful and where implementation fell short in addressing the needs of the affected population, in ensuring that Malawi was better prepared for future food crises, and in laying a foundation for improved resilience in the face of such shocks for both the affected households and Malawi as a whole. The 2016/17 FIRP was largely successful in preventing disaster and saving lives and livelihoods. However, the assessment of the design and implementation of the FIRP highlighted the high level of dependency of the Malawi government on its development partners for resources to undertake such humanitarian responses and the significant deficiencies in the technical and institutional capacity of the institutions responsible for responding. Unless the cycle of food insecurity is broken and the resilience of Malawian food systems increased, the government of Malawi and its development partners will continue to depend on FIRP-type interventions to save people’s lives and protect them from food insecurity and hunger.