This document discusses integrating gender equity and empowerment into the Dairy Goat and Root Crop Production project in Kenya. It provides definitions of empowerment and gender equity. While the project aims to analyze impacts on empowerment and gender equity, its current approach focuses more on activities and outcomes rather than a framework defining and measuring empowerment. The presentation recommends developing an empowerment framework involving local stakeholders to define empowerment and a pathway to achieve it through participatory methods and accountability. This would help ensure the project meaningfully contributes to empowerment and addresses different community aspirations.

1. Partner Logo
Partner
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Integrating gender equity and empowerment in the Dairy Goat
and Root Crop Production project: current issues and next steps
Alessandra Galiè
Social Scientist: Gender, ILRI
Integrated Dairy Goat and Root Crop Production Workshop, ILRI Nairobi, 19 June 2013

2. Overview of presentation
• Why empowerment and gender equity in AR4D
• Status of empowerment and gender equity in
the project
• Next steps: integrating an empowerment
framework and pathway in the project

3. Gender equity and empowerment
definitions
Empowerment is considered to be:
• Change in power relations
• Domination by individuals over chance and circumstances
• Capability to negotiate, influence, hold institutions accountable
• A means to self-determination
Gender equity denotes the equivalence in life outcomes for women
and men, recognising their different needs and interests, and
requiring a redistribution of power and resources.
Sources: Kabeer 2010; Sen 1990

4. Why empowerment in agricultural
research for development (AR4D)
Empowerment is considered a means for farmers to:
• Better participate in research
• Voice their needs and benefit from AR4D
• Safeguards their interests and livelihoods
• Achieve gender equity
Sources: Almekinders 2006; De Schutter 2009; Song 2010

5. Empowerment integration in projects
Empowerment is frequently integrated as:
• A vague concept
• An activity
• An outcome of participatory approaches
• An outcome of accessing financial resources
• Any impact on the life of vulnerable groups

6. Gender equity and empowerment in
the Dairy Goat and Root Crop project
Project objectives:
– To analyse impacts (productivity, environmental, gender and
empowerment, food security and nutrition) of integrating
improved goat breeds with sweet-potatoes and cassava into an
agro-pastoral farming system (p. 13)
Project outcomes:
– Increased ability of women to independently participate in various
stages of the value chains;
– More equitable social relationships between men and women
involved in the goat and root crop value chains (p. 27)

7. Gender strategy and activities
Strategy: gender analysis to assess current situation; integration
of gender in all project activities, M&E and Impacts; gender
research to inform other interventions
Activities:
• Capacity building of staff in gender analysis
• Community trainings on gender awareness-raising
• Inclusion of women in breeding, market, animal health
activities
• Provision of assets to women (joint ownership)
• Support women’s special interest groups
• Strategies to involve very poor households and youth
• Gender analysis to enhance gender-equity
• Integration of gender into project components

8. Findings and recommendations of the
Mid-term evaluation
Findings
• Gender equity as a key emergent property of system
• Focus on transforming people’s normative frameworks
• Farmers limited involvement in the intervention
Recommendations
• Research into development pathways
• Gender empowerment framework

9. Key issues and research questions
• What do we mean by gender equity and empowerment?
• Do all women and men want the same development path?
• What activities contribute to empowerment and how?
• How do we measure progress towards empowerment?

10. From empowerment framework to
empowerment pathway
Empowerment conceptual framework:
– What is empowerment?
Empowerment pathway:
– How do we translate empowerment framework
into local realities to achieve equity of
development?

11. Developing an
empowerment framework
Defining empowerment:
• What do we mean with gender equity and empowerment?
• Who decides which gender relations are ‘desirable’?
Empowerment as self-determination
• What does it mean to (different) farmers?
• What change based on current realities and aspirations?
Sources: Kabeer 2010; Sen 1990

12. Developing an empowerment pathway
• Adopt the Participatory Impact Pathway Analysis
framework with farmers at local level
• Define indicators of change with farmers
• Build in feed-back loops for accountability to
farmers and improved effectiveness
At what stage of the project do we integrate this
new understanding?
Sources: Alvarez et al 2008; Jacobs 2010

13. Empowerment framework and pathway
Gender analysis
Participatory ML&E
, Gender Strategy p.11
Integrating the empowerment
framework and pathway into the project

14. Further questions
• Can gender analysis alone contribute to achieving
empowerment and gender equity?
• Who decides what are desirable gender relations?
• How do we accommodate alternative development paths?
• Where is empowerment in the research-to-development
continuum?
• Is a non-participatory project intrinsically disempowering?
• What about aspirations that ‘do not fit’ with our mandate?
Sources: Hellin et al 2007

15. Bibliography
• Almekinders, C. and J. Hardon, eds. 2006 Bringing Farmers Back into Breeding:
Experiences with Participatory Plant Breeding (Wageningen: Agromisa Foundation).
• Alvarez, B. et al. 2008. Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis: A practical method for
project planning and evaluation, ILAC Brief No. 17. The ILAC Initiative, Bioversity.
• De Schutter, O. 2009, “Seed Policies and the Right to Food: Enhancing Agrobiodiversity
and Encouraging Innovation,” UN General Assembly, vol. 42473.
• Hellin, J. et al. 2007. Increasing the Impacts of Participatory Research. Experimental
Agriculture, 44(01), pp. 81–95.
• Jacobs, A. 2010: Creating the missing feed-back loop, IDS Bulletin 41, 6.
• Kabeer, N. 2010. Women’s Empowerment, Development Interventions and the
Management of Information Flows, IDS Bulletin 41, 6.
• Sen, A. 1990. Development as Capability Expansion, in Human Development and the
International Development Strategy for the 1990s, ed. K. Griffi n and J. Knight (London:
MacMillan)
• Song, Y. and R., Vernooy 2010. Seeds of Empowerment: Action Research in the Context
of the Feminization of Agriculture in Southwest China, Gender Technology and
Development 14, 1: 25– 44.