Inclusive governance and policies can promote adaptation to climate change as well as resilience of women in the agrifood system. The Women's empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) is a diagnostic tool developed by IFPRI to help evaluate the extent to which women are empowered across the policy cycle related to agrifood systems. WEAGov provides a way to identify gaps and opportunities to raise women’s voice and agency at different stages of the policy cycle, and provides a basis for monitoring progress in women’s empowerment in agrifood systems governance over time. The workshop described here took place on May 11, 2023 in Abuja, Nigeria and included policymakers, researchers, and private sector representatives. The workshop familiarized stakeholders with the WEAGov assessment framework and collected valuable inputs and feedback on a recent WEAGov pilot study conducted in Nigeria. While participants largely validated the WEAGov indicators, they recommended key areas for improved measurement which will be incorporated into the assessment framework.

Women’s equal participation and leadership in political and public life can boost a country’s long-run economic growth, foster social inclusion, and help countries reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Beyond these important outcomes, women’s inclusion in public life is a basic human right: women deserve a role in making decisions, controlling resources, and shaping policies. Despite the importance of women’s voices and their empowerment in policy and decision-making processes, it is far easier to lament their absence than to define and measure them. We know that political empowerment, measured in terms of the share of women in government ministries and parliament, is low and is the weakest dimension in the Global Gender Gap. Yet such national statistics, while important and informative, risk mismeasuring women’s participation and influence in public life and do not give policymakers and advocacy organizations traction on specific gaps and opportunities for increasing women’s voice in policymaking. With this situation in mind and focusing on agrifood systems, which are crucial for delivering the SDGs, we developed an assessment framework—Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov)— to assess women’s voice and empowerment in national policy processes in agrifood systems. This paper presents the first pilot-testing of WEAGov in Nigeria. In this paper, we present how the WEAGov tool works in the Nigerian context, analyze the data, and provide diagnostic on the status of women’s voice and empowerment in the agrifood policy process. As discussed in this paper, the pilot-testing in Nigeria provides useful lessons toward improving the measurement for future use and provides valuable policy insights on critical entry points for increasing women’s voice and empowerment in the national agrifood policy process.

WEAGov assesses the state of women’s voice and agency in national agrifood policymaking. Like IFPRI’s Kaleidoscope Model, it adopts a policy process approach, looking at every stage of the policy cycle — from why certain issues become salient and how policy solutions to address them are designed, to the organizational strategies and budgetary outlays that shape policy implementation, to how policies are assessed against their objectives. Within each of these stages, WEAGov examines whether women are being considered, whether their voices are included, and whether they are influencing actions and decisions.

This paper develops a new framework to measure and track women’s empowerment in governance of countries’ agrifood systems. All too often, women’s needs, priorities, and voices are missing from the policy process, even when women may be disproportionately affected by shocks or have distinct policy preferences. The Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Systems Governance (WEAGov) is an assessment framework to help countries and stakeholders measure the extent of inclusion and leadership of women in agrifood systems governance and to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. WEAGov looks across three stages of the policy cycle: policy design, policy implementation, and policy evaluation. At each stage of the policy cycle, WEAGov asks three questions central to women’s empowerment in governance: Are women considered? Are women included? And are women influencing? This paper describes the process of conceptualizing and developing the WEAGov assessment framework by drawing together evidence, experience, and lessons from the literature and from over 30 stakeholder consultations across several countries and sectors to develop a practical and theoretically grounded framework.

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Development Challenges, South-South Solutions is the monthly e-newsletter of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation in UNDP (www.southerninnovator.org). It has been published every month since 2006. Its sister publication, Southern Innovator magazine, has been published since 2011.