Browsing by Author "Peterman, Amber"

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Evaluation of Grassroots Community-Based Legal Aid Activities in Uganda and Tanzania: Strengthening Women's Legal Knowledge and Land Rights
(2013) Behrman, Julia; Billings, Lucy; Peterman, Amber
"Progressive legislative actions in Uganda and Tanzania have improved women's legal rights to land, however significant gender disparities persist in access, control, inheritance, and ownership of land at the grassroots level. One promising mechanism to improve the implementation of laws is through Community-based Legal Aid (CBLA) programs, which are typically designed as pro-poor to enhance legal empowerment of marginalized groups. CBLA programs targeting gender and land-rights issues aim to improve knowledge of existing laws, attitudes toward women's ability to own or control land and practice on how land is administrated and distributed in rural communities. To date, there is little rigorous evidence on how effective these programs are in meeting these objectives. A qualitative study of CBLA programs in Uganda and Tanzania was conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to assess the efficacy of CBLA activities, understand challenges faced by CBLA implementing organizations, and document opportunities and potential for scaling-up. Results demonstrate clear demand for enhanced CBLA services in program areas. Policy implications point to a number of opportunities for scale-up efforts from the programmatic level to the national policy level to improve the coverage and quality of CBLA services."
Gender, Assets, and Agricultural Development Programs: A Conceptual Framework
(2011) Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Johnson, Nancy; Quisumbing, Agnes; Njuki, Jemimah; Behrman, Julia; Rubin, Deborah; Peterman, Amber; Waithanji, Elizabeth
"Being able to access, control, and own productive assets such as land, labor, finance, and social capital enables people to create stable and productive lives. Yet relatively little is known about how agricultural development programs can most effectively deliver these outcomes of well-being, empowerment, and higher income in a way that acknowledges differential access to and control over assets by men and women. After reviewing the literature on gender and assets, this paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding the gendered pathways through which asset accumulation occurs, including attention to not only men's and women's assets but also those they share in joint control and ownership. Unlike previous frameworks, this model depicts the gendered dimensions of each component of the pathway in recognition of the evidence that men and women not only control, own, or dispose of assets in different ways, but also access, control, and own different kinds of assets. The framework generates gender-specific hypotheses that can be tested empirically: i) Different types of assets enable different livelihoods, with a greater stock and diversity of assets being associated with more diverse livelihoods and better well-being outcomes; ii) Men and women use different types of assets to cope with different types of shocks; iii) Interventions that increase men's and women's stock of a particular asset improve the bargaining power of the individual(s) who control that asset; and iv) Interventions and policies that reduce the gender gap in assets are better able to achieve development outcomes related to food security, health, and nutrition and other aspects of well-being related to agency and empowerment. The implications of these gender differences for designing agricultural development interventions to increase asset growth and returns to assets as well as for value chain development are discussed. Based on this analysis, additional gaps in knowledge and possible investigations to address them are identified."
The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index
(2012) Alkire, Sabina; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Peterman, Amber; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Seymour, Greg; Vaz, Ana
"The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was initially developed as a tool to reflect women's empowerment that may result from the United States government's Feed the Future Initiative, which commissioned the development of the WEAI. The WEAI can also be used more generally to assess the state of empowerment and gender parity in agriculture, to identify key areas in which empowerment needs to be strengthened, and to track progress over time. The WEAI is an aggregate index, reported at the country or regional level, based on individual-level data collected by interviewing men and women within the same households. The WEAI comprises two subindexes. The first assesses the degree to which women are empowered in five domains of empowerment (5DE) in agriculture. It reflects the percentage of women who are empowered and, among those who are not, the percentage of domains in which women enjoy adequate achievements. These domains are (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) control of use of income, (4) leadership in the community, and (5) time allocation. The second subindex (the Gender Parity Index [GPI]) measures gender parity. The GPI reflects the percentage of women who are empowered or whose achievements are at least as high as the men in their households. For those households that have not achieved gender parity, the GPI shows the empowerment gap that needs to be closed for women to reach the same level of empowerment as men. This technical paper documents the development of the WEAI and presents pilot data from Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Uganda, so that researchers and practitioners seeking to use the index in their own work would understand how the survey questionnaires were developed and piloted, how the qualitative case studies were undertaken, how the index was constructed, how various indicators were validated, and how it can be used in other settings."