Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for coming.
[OVERLAPPING] If you ask for more coffee,
you will get more coffee.
We are very excited.
We are very excited that we have
our key note speaker Dr. Agnes Quisumbing,
who has waded through the snow in Boston.
I have nothing, funny to say
about her so I'm just going to [inaudible]
She says she had some interesting food she likes to
take food pictures [inaudible].
Today we have a different kind of program.
We have our keynote speaker,
we have our panel.
We will have a careers discussion over
lunch and we will announce the poster winner.
There is an amazing poster session every luncheon.
Thank you for those amazing posters.
[APPLAUSE] It is really hard, poster making.
They worked many more hours than they expected
because there are so many amazing posters.
We have another panel this afternoon and it will have
some workshops and a couple
of guests and then a closing session.
Let me introduce Dr. Quisumbing with
some further information and you can
click on previous bios on the online program.
She's a Senior Research Fellow with
the Food Consumption and Nutrition Division of IFPRI,
International Food Policy Research Institute
in Washington DC.
She leads the cross-cutting research team on gender.
It is really amazing that we
got her to agree to come out of
her busy schedule even though she
only had 24 hours to do it.
Well, if I'm hearing that,
so we really appreciate you for doing this.
All of the speakers that we brought,
because they work in international development,
they travel all over the world and
their schedules are booked like months in advance,
and so for them to agree to set aside a day in
the end of February and March,
that is really amazing and we really appreciate
all of you who did that to make this conference happen.
Everybody give them a hand.
[APPLAUSE].
Dr. Quisumbing received her PhD and MA in
economics from the University of the Philippines.
She was a full bred case fellow at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Business fellow at Economic Growth Center at
Yale University and an economist at the World Bank.
She is published widely
on gender, intrahousehold allocation,
property rights, poverty, and economic mobility.
She has done field work in
Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia,
and Philippines, and she has worked with
data from many more sites than that.
Dr. Quisumbing is undertaking
impact evaluations of nutrition
sensitive agricultural development programs
in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa,
focusing on their impacts on
women's empowerment and gender asset inequality.
She is co-developer of the famous WEAI,
Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index
and is co-editor of
Gender in Agriculture and Food
Security: Closing the Knowledge Gap.
Thank you and we will have a discussion with you
today after the first speaker. [APPLAUSE].
Thank you to everyone who organized
this conference and thank you to
everyone who braved the snow,
high winds, whatever, to come here.
It is not an easy place to
come to if you live in Massachusetts,
[LAUGHTER] but it's very
beautiful so I'm really really happy. [inaudible]
Oh, sorry.
Okay. Just a correction about my affiliation,
we recently actually did a name change.
We are now called the Poverty,
Health, and Nutrition Division.
We are also foodies,
but we do not [inaudible].
We are talking about the nutrition condition of the poor.
So when I was
invited to come here and I was told that the topic was
[inaudible] I was really quite
excited about it because I
spent a lot of the early part of
my career working to
test theories of household behaviors.
The predominant theory at the time was
that households made decisions as one,
and that everybody just
happily agreed with whoever made the decision.
Of course you all know from real life, that is not true.
This is what it meant years ago
was that we actually helped to
create the empirical evidence that debunked this theory.
In doing so, I've had
some very interesting field experiences.
But one thing I have to mention and as Maria said
is that I also like to take good pictures,
so this is ready for Instagram.
[LAUGHTER] One of the countries
in which I worked a lot is Bangladesh and so
I got to eat a lot of Bangladesh food,
and I also go to work a lot in Ghana and Ethiopia
so even with my old buggy camera,
I was able to take good pictures.
I really [inaudible].
[LAUGHTER] One of my most recent field experiences
was actually not only in my own country,
but in my own province of Cebu as part of [inaudible].
When we look at value chains
for coconut, swine and seaweed.
Seaweed is grown offshore,
of the sea shore on farms.
When we did field work we had
a very unusual experience of having to walk for
an hour in the tidal flats
[inaudible] [LAUGHTER] anyway, it was fun.
So obviously since I'm so interested in grains,
I wanted to look at what
the diet in the planet looks like.
I did not do this myself, obviously,
a very big commission,
of the Lancet did this work at the planetary health data.
Their recommendation for a diet
that is good for the planet as well as good for us,
is very big on vegetables and fruits.
Basically half of the diet
should come from plant sources,
fruits and veg and
very little actually from animal sources.
That is on the overall.
But if you take a look at what the diets are regionally,
if you look at the global diet.
The global diet is very skewed
towards starchy vegetables and staples,
and towards animal products, particularly red meat.
These are things which we're supposed
to reduce intake on.
But if you look at the two regions where I worked at,
that is, South Asia,
and Sub-Saharan Africa, we now see
a very big step regionally in equality.
On one of the South Asian diet cultures,
starch is a very non diverse diet,
and Sub-Saharan Africa the diets are
obviously not very diverse and so this is not
good in terms of
your balanced and micro nutrient consumption.
So we all know [inaudible].
They do not only need
those macro nutrients but also micro nutrients like Iron,
Vitamin A and C that helps
the other small micro nutrients
to have a healthier productive life.
Now there is also inequality by birth or location.
Everywhere around the globe,
there is infants and young children [inaudible].
This is work that has been
produced in the Global Nutrition Report.
Some of these correlation between wealth
and diet are to be expected,
so I'm not sure if you can see it very well [inaudible].
In terms of dietary diversity,
meal frequency, introduction to solids,
the highest [inaudible] better,
but in terms of continued breastfeeding at two years,
continued breast feeding at one year,
exclusive breast feeding, the highest [inaudible].
There are similar disparities [inaudible] as well.
Now, even though this has taken us from the planets diet,
to the regions diet,
differences across the worlds classes,
now let us look within the household.
This is a gender conference,
and so I think we are going to be
only interested in gender inequality.
So we at the interhousehold distribution
of energy index in Bangladesh.
We compare the poorest 20 percent households
and the richest 20 percent households,
we find that across all categories,
males have a higher energy intake than females.
The only exception is for
primary school age children where females are
slightly higher only by 200 calories per consumption.
You can see here that
these are images that we get energy intakes.
If you actually look at
the distribution of macro nutrient intakes,
you are going to see that there's
even more gender inequality
in the Bangladesh index of distribution to
the extent that women who are of reproductive age who are
supposed to be getting quite a big amount of
iron though they get less than the boys do.
So to ground ourselves,
I would like to use the comparison
of inequality break down.
[inaudible] It's useful to
start with some definitions here.
Equality is defined as our
[inaudible] to define the distribution and the picture
they use to illustrate this
is the three kids are looking at a baseball game.
They have three equal boxes
but the littlest kid can not get a chance to see.
Whereas, equity involves, at
attention to the process and a fairness.
We're looking at a just distribution.
With a re-distribution of the boxes,
the littlest kid can have a chance
to look at the baseball game as well.
When we look at inequities and we're looking at process,
we're looking at differences that are unnecessary,
that are avoidable, they are unfair, they are unjust.
When you take a look at the gender differences
that we're trying to eradicate,
let's look at those which are unnecessary,
avoidable, unfair, and unjust.
There are some gender differences which are equitable.
For example, if a woman is going to
get more iron than a man,
that's an inequality, but that,
actually, satisfies her biologically.
To lead us into our talk now,
I will be talking about agriculture, nutrition,
and gender inequities and the role that
women's empowerment in the gender
they play this [inaudible].
It's useful to start with a definition of empowerment
that many of us are using which comes to [inaudible],
which is really the conceptualization
of empowerment as process of change
made up of three dimensions:
resources, agency, and achievements.
Resources are the material, human,
and social resources that certainly
enhance one's ability to exercise choice.
Agencies are the capacity to define
one's own goals and makes
strategic choices to pursue these goals,
especially in context with [inaudible].
Achievements are achievement for one's goals.
Now, along the agriculture and nutrition pathways,
I'm going now from work of
Marie Ruel and Harold Alderman,
just published in the Lancet.
They identify six pathways
between agriculture and nutrition.
The first is agriculture as a source for consumption,
agriculture as a source of income,
the way that agriculture products affect prices,
including the [inaudible] cost.
Then the last three pathways
are really quite important in terms of women.
Women's participation in agriculture and the effect of
the social status and empowerment with
access to food and controlled resources.
The impact on her participation
in agriculture by allocation,
but also the impact on her own health
and nutrition status [inaudible] nutrition.
[NOISE] If you're designing an intervention,
how do you know what pathways you're going to implement?
Let's say that we're all in international development,
let's say we're in agriculture sector,
are you going to be focusing
on agriculture as a source of food?
Agriculture as a source of income?
Or perhaps you work for
a marketing agency and you want to affect food prices.
That's usually the purview of ministries of
agriculture and the more traditional ag people.
Then there are those, like us,
focus on the [inaudible].
We look at the social status and how it might affect that
really need to participate in
programs and adapt technologies.
We look at number 5,
whether [inaudible] practices are affected by these
and both parties affects nutritional status.
[NOISE] There is all nutrition
and health participating all this group last state time,
it may not benefit [inaudible] net benefit in terms of
[inaudible] net benefit [inaudible] it may not.
All in all, gender relations
really underlie all these processes.
How're going to intervene
really depends on what is your goal is.
Is your goal to reach [inaudible] basically
benefit women or is it to empower women.
So if we wanted to reach
women we definitely have to include
the profitabilities if your program
aims to benefit women,
you will aim to increase women's
well-being with security and [inaudible] health.
But if you want to empower
women it's really a lot more difficult.
It's to strengthen their ability to make
strategic life choices and
to put those choices into action.
We see a lot of
development programs say "We're going to empower women."
But when you actually look at
what they're doing there's nothing empowering.
It doesn't mean that projects which are
[inaudible] benefit are bad projects.
For example, a vaccination project that
aims to reach children universally may not be empowering,
but you better to do it otherwise [inaudible].
Let's take a look at applying these
[inaudible].
This is a framework which we
developed in the gender agriculture
and Athens project [inaudible].
I really find it useful when we try to take a look at how
projects are actually trying to
reach [inaudible] empower women.
For example, if we're
looking at access program that is going to
deliver essential services to women
some of the strategies
might include providing transportation,
conducting training at convenient times and we look at
the proportion of women attending
training and receiving [inaudible].
All of us who received
money from the USAID
have probably [inaudible] like these.
Now, if you're attempting to increasing
this well-being you need to go a bit further.
You have to consider women's preferences
[inaudible] help them training.
You need for indicators sets,
these aggregated data for land use,
[inaudible] income, consumption,
efficient time usage [inaudible].
For example, if your program is an official program,
you really should get,
indicators on men, women, and children.
Basically everybody in the household program,
that they should be coded and disaggregated [inaudible].
Now if you want to empower women and
increase their agency over production
and [inaudible] strategies
enhance women's decision-making power.
Households and communities, especially on crops to grow,
and indicators would include
decision-making indicators about the power,
decision-making power of production,
income and food consumption
as well as potential consequences.
Least programs increase
the incidents of gender-based violence.
These programs create unnecessary burden on women.
These are things that we need to take
[inaudible] assume that women have
all the spare time can do yet another development.
To get a better understanding
of what these possible activities are
[inaudible] partner projects in
the gender agriculture as [inaudible] two.
We asked them to work with
their strategies to reach back to that following.
These are all projects which have
[inaudible] objective or so they say,
[inaudible] reach them will achieve it better than
others and the activity areas
involve in providing goods and services,
strengthening organizations, especially groups,
building knowledge and skills
and influencing gender reforms.
The [inaudible] are still on-going.
I would say by 2022,
we will have a better idea of which
among all these strategies work to empower women.
The implication from project's that,
if you're going to think,
even about putting women's empowerment
as a project objective,
your objectives, strategies,
tactics and indicators have to be aligned.
As you're seeking to empower women,
you have to think about what tactics would
affect what women's empowerment.
We have to be very intentional about this.
For founders, founders please do you due diligence.
Check objectives,
strategies, tactics, and indicators align.
There really can be no empowerment plan [inaudible]
the strategists have to be in line with this empowerment.
If you're project and a founder,
you need to have indicators.
Because if your organization,
a large donor organization many,
many projects and all your project are saying they
all empower women but they all have different indicators,
how are you going to judge [inaudible]
what's working and what's not.
So in line with that,
it [inaudible] has been involved since 2011 in
the development [inaudible]
agriculture index with [inaudible]
and USAID is now developing a project that
[inaudible] agriculture
for nutrition and health.
It was really clear as we started
this process that it was not going to be easy.
I know that seven years ago when we launched
the women's empowerment in agriculture index
[inaudible] to say,
you can't measure the profit
if you believe in the profit.
Fortunately, we did this with them.
[NOISE] As a brief overview,
our starting point is
our women's own empowerment agriculture index
which was developed in USA [inaudible] launched in 2012.
Adequacy started to measure inclusion in
the agricultural sectors as
far as we see the future initiative.
It's a survey-based index
[NOISE] that goes through
various women at the same households.
It's quite different from
other gender-related indexes which
are actually based in secondary data.
For example, Gender Gap Index,
which are very commonly used index
which are made of big data series,
is based on secondary data for national statistics.
Some few may have seen this before,
so if you have, you
take a quick nap [LAUGHTER], absolutely quickly.
The way I show you, [NOISE] this is
an index for the five main environment,
five [inaudible], which is
a direct measure of goods in four or five dimensions.
I also mentioned earlier,
we pulled up the same data from
them so we can compare the environment of
women compared to the same household and
that gives you the gender parity index,
which gives you then [NOISE] the environment
compared to the primary male council.
If you make the data for a long time,
the way we see this concept is like a layered cake.
We don't do donuts [NOISE].
The way I classified index which
are starting from the top; production, resources,
income, leadership and client,
which are now measures with set indicators.
I'm not going to read all of them, you can look them out.
In the process of fielding this,
people in the field are saying that it
is very long implement,
so we also developed a 60 degree average,
which saves [inaudible].
Now, what we had was an
integrated [inaudible] called
classified domestic agriculture.
It was a standardized
measure s we can actually run later.
For this first [inaudible] in the future countries,
we actually have more than eight organization now,
you can navigate version from there and
have the ability to just diagnose a problem with that.
However, projects wanted something different.
If you recall, this was first
developed for use in population based service.
They received a feature program to use
this but in a very large scale.
What is worth it is it's
more availability for project content.
So for example, if you were a lifestyle project,
there's really not enough detail in here about lifestyle.
Once the crops grow,
here's really not enough detail in here for crops.
Of course everything begin will be
really long because earlier it
will break [inaudible] Some projects,
especially with regard to nutrition,
wanted more attention to domain.
Decision making [inaudible].
Then project themselves,
walk up to this things here.
[inaudible] Mobility,
they can actually go to these places.
They control the projects generally.
Are they free from domestic violence?
These were things that weren't
originally in the projects people wanted.
Of course, everybody wanted shorter [inaudible].
Another thing also is that communities make
themselves very different from understanding from us.
We were able to understand
what communities themselves [inaudible] sense,
how many times they farm.
We did qualitative work.
The way I [inaudible],
but their development relies a lot on
qualitative work to sign into and look
at what are our unmet needs.
If you recall, the three dimensions of farming,
we [inaudible] all understandings of the farmer,
that's really good quality in there.
Actually fit these domains pretty well.
In terms of the argument about what's important,
is taking care of oneself,
taking care of your family's needs,
and taking care of others is something
that should be [inaudible].
Resources have been relived
economically, so [inaudible] enabled.
Achievements have been doing real well at rest.
As I put it here [inaudible].
There's ages of being active but
also quality inclusion needs some attention here.
But this idea of basically a
burden other people take care [inaudible].
it really requires a definition on
how people look at a person who is applying here,
People know that many of the countries where
[inaudible] have definition inequality.
If it was translated or phrased as how
would you describe you admired leaders?
How would you describe a woman in this environment?
In all versions we're looking at,
whether the original wear or the old,
there are three types of agencies.
To find this more related,
frame this data,
more consistently
[inaudible].
Any dangers flying out
with these three types of agencies,
we've developed indicators
of quality instrumental agencies.
In the intrinsic agency domain,
you have the ability to decide by yourself,
you're self motivate, your self-efficacy,
attitudes about domestic violence,
and there's respect among us.
You can see that the interests that
agency domain actually brings
in a lot of the ideas of the projects themselves.
The instrumental agency domain,
it has a lot of our individuals.
Already faced with I think
many problems that affect their [inaudible].
Is it the informations?
Access to efficient financial services.
Then we have two indicators of collective agency,
full membership and membership [inaudible].
What we realized is that we probably
need more collective agency.
It was very interesting that some of
the things that people think of us,
collective agency right now.
When people we taught this,
for example say, "All this script?"
No. You must have enough collective data.
No, they said, we do this to get credit.
And so I think there's an issue there how we
conceptualize what it means to have collective data.
So what's interesting there is that it was
being developed collaboratively with
the third beat projects which are on the right-hand side.
Deletion of all the proposals.
[inaudible] domains of crops,
livestock with combining crops and livestock.
So there are three projects
across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The project that I'm going to
speak about on is the Angel Project.
This is the agriculture gender [inaudible] project,
the Angel Project.
The principal investigator is Dr. Ahmed.
Before I tell you about ANGeL,
let me tell you the back story.
After we launched the WEAI in 2012,
the [inaudible] folks went out [inaudible] service.
Then we got the service again and
concluded the WEAI and did
the composition analysis to look at what were
the sources of this fund.
Although the draft does not give
you what domains belong to what,
you will see very clearly that
the country which has the most disempowered women,
the greatest percent of disempowered women is Bangladesh.
All the way to the left. A lot
of the Sub-Saharan African countries are to the right,
but it's actually quite mixed.
Cambodia is an outlier.
It has to do with a little bit
about how some of the indicators,
some of the questions,
were interpreted because we couldn't ask questions
about speaking public which is
originally one of the indicators in
the leadership domain because it's
a very politically sensitive question.
These findings show that Bangladesh had
the highest proportion of disempowered women.
When these results represented
to the Ministry of Agriculture,
the Ministry of Agriculture was really not pleased.
She said [inaudible] something about it.
She's a very determined and forceful woman, so basically,
she told IFRI, "Okay,
guys and girls, we need to do something about it.
Why don't we design and implement
a pilot project which will test what
strategy works best to increase agricultural production,
improve our nutrition situation,
and also to empower women."
Wow, that's really a very tall order.
But you have to do it scientifically
because if we can't do it scientifically,
there's no point in scaling them.
Fortunately, we had data and our data came
from a 2011-2012 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey,
BIHS, which is the first survey
of Bangladesh which was [inaudible] of rural Bangladesh.
We used that survey that
came up with the following findings.
We found out that agricultural diversity promotes
household and child dietary diversity and
dietary equality even after [inaudible].
I want to note here also
that the nutrition outcome that we want
to affect here is really dietary quality
because that's what we can expect radical change.
You really can't expect
agriculture to get a big [inaudible]
standing because something is affected by
so many other factors like health,
sanitation, and all that other stuff.
The other thing that they found is
that women's empowerment as mentioned by the WEAI
improves household child material dietary diversity.
Agricultural diversity also increases
with the primary woman's empowerment.
The Agriculture, Gender and Nutrition Linkages project
or ANGeL aims to strengthen
the nexus between agriculture, nutrition, and gender.
To study this,
we use a randomized controlled trial
with several treatment arms.
There were five interventions delivered to both men and
women and nothing was delivered in [inaudible].
Think of this as an insect,
an insect with six legs.
Leg one, E1 is nutrition behavior change communication,
which was delivered by
the [inaudible] agricultural extension officers.
E2 was nutrition,
BCC which was delivered by trained community women.
E3, agriculture production provided
by department agriculture extension workers.
E4, ag extension workers were
trained to deliver agriculture plus nutrition.
Five, that agricultural nutrition agendas,
the VAD and project facilitators that were hired by
[inaudible] is actually world-famous for its [inaudible]
randomly assigned between [inaudible] controlled groups
[inaudible] The end-line survey with Detroit,
the active project phase ended [inaudible] March, 2018.
This is actually a pretty short duration of intervention.
We used difference and difference estimates to
look at the difference for the change between the group.
The household will receive trainings and [inaudible].
Note that there are no assets
transferred to the participant.
It's not like, for example,
have a project [inaudible] livestock.
It's really a training-based program.
As a result [inaudible] from the country.
The participants were assigned to five different arms.
The [inaudible] assistant agriculture officers
and were being monitored by the [inaudible] officers with
coordination and technical assistance from
the agriculture [inaudible] steering
committee [inaudible] and overall
the Ministry of Agriculture.
[inaudible] training approach, nutrition,
providing all this very factual and science-based,
evidence-based recommendations of the [inaudible] diets.
It had [inaudible] agriculture [inaudible]
and it had [inaudible]
connection [inaudible] which
also involved community conversations.
You see lots of men here, men and elders,
people who are important people to the woman herself.
In terms of program implementation average [inaudible]
of women is higher [inaudible].
Training [inaudible] together helped to [inaudible].
It's quite interesting that before men were
usually excluded from nutrition education
and women from ag education.
They actually enjoyed this,
meeting with [inaudible] go out together and talk about
the agriculture and nutrition.
[inaudible] discuss them with
their neighbors and relatives,
they liked their trainers,
they found [inaudible] helpful.
They use a variety of [inaudible].
Everybody said, almost everybody
said had no difficulty on the training.
Let's look at the results.
Take a look at [inaudible] on that side.
Just look at that looking at the bars,
the bars show changes in reference to the control group.
What they found is that men's
agricultural production knowledge grew,
especially for interventions in
agriculture components [inaudible] agriculture components.
[inaudible] partially [inaudible]
all the agriculture components.
But the impacts on women's agriculture
production knowledge are even greater.
Men adopted more improved
agriculture production practices after ANGel,
again, mostly in the [inaudible] agriculture.
But women had even greater adoption of
improved agriculture production practices particularly in
the three treatments arms which
focus on agriculture production.
[inaudible] diversification [inaudible] using [inaudible].
Everybody knows statistically significant effects
on field crop [inaudible].
But there was a large gain in
the number of non-rice crops grown
in homes and gardens and homes and gardens of
the loom are usually [inaudible].
Then we also asked
questions about nutrition knowledge and [inaudible]
training and we found
that all the interventions actually,
statistically significantly include efficient knowledge
with women outperforming men.
Household dietary diversity was measured
[inaudible] and all of them,
they improved significantly in the nutrition treatment on
with the community women [inaudible].
Interestingly, the agriculture [inaudible]
Improve dietary diversity of
treatment [inaudible] baseline and
women were more empowered across intervention.
These are baseline and
[inaudible] even in a controlled group.
If you break this down,
what's interesting is women became more empowered in
asset ownership and income decisions particularly in P5.
Men also became more empowered in
production in conversation from P1-P5.
Where does these changes come from?
They're most likely from attitudes
related to gender [inaudible].
We look at their agreement with statements based on
[inaudible] nurturing connections curriculum.
This whole list of questions
here which [inaudible] PowerPoint.
I'm not going to read this.
But there were significant improvements
in women's and men's total [inaudible] in
sports particularly in P5
so note that that is a treatment arm
which includes genders [inaudible].
There was significant improvement
in women's gender active
particularly in P5 or
the verbal ones in P5 [inaudible] purple there.
Especially interestingly, even in other treatment arms,
I make important contributions to my community.
Very, I think, significant
qualitatively and also [inaudible].
Women recognize that they [inaudible].
There are also a few significant improvements
in men's individual averages,
not as much as the women.
[inaudible] empowerment are encouraging for women
increasing the empowerment with
respect to asset ownership decisions
also for men [inaudible] improvement [inaudible] arm,
and attitudes related to gender also improved in P5.
What are the effective strategies that
came out from our study of [inaudible]?
Integrating [inaudible] is important.
The combined training on agriculture, nutrition,
and gender had much greater impact than nutrition
only for agriculture only business.
Training husbands and wives
[inaudible] household was important too.
It was good for them both to receive this knowledge.
Empowering women and teaching women with
agriculture was a very important thing.
In Bangladesh, women are [inaudible] agriculture as men.
Also in many countries.
Under Angel, we found that women who received
agriculture training learned and
applied [inaudible] agriculture practices.
[inaudible] and Michael, I don't want to circle back to
the ideas of inequality and inequity.
One point that we have to make and to understand is
gender is only one aspect of inequality and inequity.
It intersects with other
social categories that would lead to
inequitable health nutrition outcomes
and depending on content,
this would be task, ethnicity, race,
national origin, religion, and [inaudible] war.
One factor may be exclusionary in
some situations but not in others.
To give a word of caution before you
do grand gender action plan,
remember that context is everything.
What is your goal and who are we reaching?
The answer will depend on
context and where the equity problem is.
It's not going to be the same everywhere.
If you're going to take the rich benefit,
empowered framework and apply it with
an equity lens when you want to
reach people you want to include marginalized groups,
under-served groups in rural communities.
For benefit you want to increase the well-being of
marginalized and underserved communities.
When it comes to empowerment,
you want to be able to strengthen their ability to make
strategic life choices and to
put those choices into action.
You'd just go ahead and distribute
iron supplements but unless you empower
people [inaudible] far-flung areas to make seeking
their own healthcare and demanding
good government services as part of their empowerment,
you're not really going to empower them.
There may be tensions across all three objectives.
Let's not forget that these tensions are valid.
I want to go back to the picture of the baseball field
and the wall separating
the little kids from the baseball field.
Reality that somebody modified
has one guy really very high up on the stands.
Equality distributed with three boxes.
Equity redistributed so all the kids could have a go.
Liberation then, removing barriers.
Isn't that a concept?
What does liberation look like?
It's going to look very
different depending on the context.
In the self-help group [inaudible] in
India it starts with
building a self-help group and
raising women's political and social consciousness.
Teaching women to speak up.
In this irrigation group in Kenya,
men and women are working together to [inaudible].
They are both pathways to [inaudible].
I think I'm going to end here by saying that it is really
satisfying [inaudible] especially for
the young people in this room.
You can't be in such a great field at a better time.
Onwards. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much. Well, we
do have thirty minutes of
Q&A discussion and then you have
a 10-minute break before the next panel,
so we have [inaudible] ready,
so you can raise your hand.
We'll also be reading from the [inaudible].
[inaudible] I'm sorry, it's
difficult to pronounce your name.
It's very easy.
[LAUGHTER] Quisumbing, but call me Agnes.
I really wanted to thank you
so much for your great contribution [inaudible] in
the field of women's issues.
I'm from Nepal. My name is Ramesh and I'm
[inaudible] in women's issues.
My question [inaudible] specific when you talk
about women empowerment [inaudible] roles and family.
What [inaudible] are you taking
[inaudible] one of the most respected issues.
In terms of [inaudible] one gentleman
[inaudible] about faith-based approach.
How do we [inaudible] I'll give you one example,
Nepali women don't drink milk for seven days when they
are on their periods and
that's one resource of [inaudible].
If women are denied to drink milk during that period,
how are you opposing any ideas, new ideas?
How do we raise the cultural sort
of [inaudible]? That's my question.
If we concentrate on cultural understanding when
you talk about [inaudible].
[inaudible] three questions.
Hello. Is this working?
Okay. I'm Lauren.
I'm a graduate student at the
University of California, Davis.
My question is about the gender of
the trainers and facilitators
in these programs and projects.
If you feel like that makes a difference,
especially if the group that is
being trained is mixed-gender,
or all men, or all women,
do you feel that makes a difference to
the efficacy of the trainings? Thank you.
I have a follow-up question about the trainings,
and that is whether the community
facilitators get any payment,
or if it's all voluntary time?
I'm going to answer,
I'm going to go the reverse.
For that, I actually don't know the answer to that,
because I was not involved in the [inaudible].
But usually, we compensate people.
But don't trust my answer, I'll find out and
get back to you.
With respect to the effect on
the trainer and all the facilitator,
it affects outcomes, I think
depending on the countries for the context.
There are some countries where
[NOISE] men and women don't typically interact in public,
and in those cases, it's probably best
to invest in training your country of females.
But it's going to take time for that country to build up.
Some special agencies have done is to also train
men to be able to interact
with women more effectively in the sense that they don't
make sexist remark and
then degrading remarks [inaudible] It's not easy.
The other thing that I want to mention actually,
so we're [inaudible] [NOISE]
the extension worker [inaudible],
so I suggest you look up your work.
The other interesting thing
that some colleagues of mine, I think,
we are doing is [inaudible].
What they're doing is actually looking at
the effect of the past of the trainer.
We're working with [inaudible].
It's a very large [inaudible] in India,
and we work in tribal areas.
It is a country where caste differences are very obvious.
There's really a lot of
discrimination against people they serve
[NOISE] based on the [inaudible].
They're not in field, actually,
running an experiment to see whether the caste,
tribal affiliation of the trainer matters in terms
of delivery of [inaudible].
I love your question [inaudible],
the last, because it's the most difficult question.
First, I want to clarify that IFPRI
is not an implementation agency.
We are not an NGO.
We are an international research organization
and we work with NGOs,
governments, policymakers,
to provide evidence on which
data being transitioned, so we don't implement.
However, we will work with
organizations we designed in this program,
which is what the agent program is about.
So in the case of
[inaudible] specific issue about women not
training because of cultural reasons,
there actually are some very good NGOs
which are embedded in communities and are working
to change a lot of these perceptions around nutrition and
practices which are not [inaudible] For example,
we had another international Sahara project
[inaudible] who are really spending a lot of time
going into understanding what are
these concepts or beliefs
which are preventing people from doing better [inaudible].
A lot of it actually involves very intensive counseling.
One of the projects that IFPRI
did in collaboration with [inaudible].
[inaudible] is an implementation agency
[inaudible] That's where they
actually tested this model
of behavior change communication.
It is very intense
[inaudible] [NOISE] trained community workers
would go and visit families
and give them counseling and teach them.
We really tailored the counseling
to the life cycle stage of the mother and child.
For example, if you're going to give
a woman who's not yet pregnant information
about complementary foods,
feed her infant at 6th month, that [inaudible].
It's not relevant.
But what this program did
was they took a look about the family life,
they really tailored the BCC.
It's very intensive.
The interesting thing about the BCC is that it can
actually be transforming in
other ways that you don't really expect.
For example, there have
been a series of studies by my colleagues in Bangladesh
with a classroom without it being
[inaudible] and what we found
is really that the project originally,
was testing whether cash
versus food is a better [inaudible].
But to solve the treatment arms,
they opted cash plus BCC and food plus BCC.
The interesting thing is that in
the treatment arms which
are behavior change communication,
there has been a long-term reduction
in the part of the minors.
I think, really, the woman has been
empowered by all these trainings
that we've directed to her,
in which have helped her [NOISE] gain agency,
this decision should [inaudible],
at first seemingly nutrition and health,
but [NOISE] they have been empowering others.
I think intensive BCC may be one of the ways to do that.
Also, involving the community,
because in many of these societies in South Asia,
they don't have very good control to resources.
They're very [inaudible] Other people
make important decisions.
So we need to bring those decision-makers over.
Thanks so much, Agnes,
for that comprehensive presentation.
It was fun to see the new directions that you
all are going [inaudible].
One thing I was thinking might be
useful is if you could explain,
since so many in our audience are not economist,
the overwhelming majority, in fact,
are not economists, why the RCTs,
the Random Controlled Trials have
become the gold standard now in development work.
I don't think it's understood what
the problem is that we've been trying
to get to with that [inaudible].
Also, specifically, in terms of
the different arms that you used for the ANGeL project,
do I remember it
correctly that gender is this only in one
of the arms or was it in [inaudible]?
[inaudible]
Why not include all the different combinations?
What was the hypothesis in terms of
only having it instead of the grand finale
of the agriculture plus nutrition plus gender? Thanks.
I should not probably answer any single questions.
This question about why have
RCTs become the gold standard, mind you,
I would say that you use
the right tool to do the right job. Closer?
Is this better?
Yes.
Okay. Why have RCTs become the gold standard?
It's partly to get rid of biases introduced
by other aspects such as self-selection in projects.
Before I answer that,
I have to give a caveat that RCTs
are not the only way of evaluating impacts.
In most, if not all,
of [inaudible] work or at least the ones
I've worked, we use RCTs.
We also have qualitative work
to help you unpack the reasons why an intervention is
working or not working [inaudible].
Let's take a simple example.
Let's talk about crops.
Actually, that could be too big of an example.
Let's take credit. Credit, I think,
is an easier one.
Let's say that you have a credit program and
you want to look
at the effect of being
a member of a credit group of a particular outcome.
Let's say that credit is given to the men who
are in credit groups and compare outcomes at the end.
Now, one issue about that is that the women
who choose to join
a credit group are usually not ordinary women;
they self-select, they could be better educated,
their husbands might be more liberal,
they may have a technique
called credit regression [inaudible].
But what is, I think,
common to all of these,
I think people should
understand this regardless of
whether you [inaudible] background or not,
is that they're trying to create
a control group, counterfactual,
which is basically trying to
mimic the effect of
what would happen if the program was not there.
People who try to mimic that
may live by random assignment using matching methods,
or other techniques, sometimes using a lot of techniques.
I must say that, as a researcher
who works with practitioners,
it is often very hard to
convince practitioners that they
need more of control group.
It's almost like, "but we can't
imagine a world in which we don't exist."
Well, then how do we prove that you're very
important if we can't imagine that we do not exist?
It's, really, I think it might take some humility to say,
imagine a world where you don't exist.
But hey, if you
really want to convince your donor that it's working,
putting money in your project,
maybe try to show what life would have
been like without that project, without you there.
Now, going to your question,
I'm not sure I answer this question well.
RCTs have been taken up in economics as
the gold standard but my view of
RCTs did not come from economics.
It's the public health people
who've been doing RCTs for ages.
The public health people actually know
better what the limitations of RCTs are.
I was involved in one of the first,
big evaluations of conditional measurement
of improvement, through [inaudible].
The economist in my team at IFPRI
[inaudible] were so gung-ho about RCT.
Our nutritionist were like that,
"We've done that for years."
Because of the nutritionist and
public health people who know the limitations of RCTs,
they know when it works and also when it does not.
There is actually a whole new range
of evaluation [inaudible],
I would suggest looking at all of them before
deciding that the RCT is the one for you.
RCTs can give you
very exact answers to very limited questions.
If you have more complicated questions,
you might want to use a [inaudible] evaluation.
Why did we use [inaudible]
gender-sensitization only in one [inaudible] arms?
It is because nobody had actually demonstrated
the additionality of integrating
gender with this [inaudible].
Remember that we are trying to
convince a Ministry of Agriculture
to allocate scarce resources across programs.
The way to do that is to really show what
the additionality of each program deployment was.
Is it going to be an agriculture program only,
a nutrition program only, a gender program only?
That was the reason for doing the [inaudible].
It's really the best because even
though we know from small-scale empirical work,
the thing of [inaudible] where gender is important,
it had not been tested in
the context of a large agricultural program,
agricultural nutrition program as
being implemented to scale.
We were also working in a country where there were
very few [inaudible] facilitators,
so you'll be pleased to know that they're
actually planning to scale this up nationally.
Hi, I'm Paige [inaudible].
Thank you very much for your presentation
and also for your contribution to gender in agriculture.
I appreciate your inclusion of the importance of context.
I wonder if there are more broad consideration
for the [inaudible] in Latin America,
given that the majority of the projects are focused
in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia?
It's really nice that you could say that
because we actually haven't worked in Latin America.
We have never obtained [inaudible] work in Latin America.
Many of our other policies in
the CdA are using it in Latin America.
IDB has actually used it.
The Inter-American Development Bank
has actually been using it in
food projects in Bolivia and [inaudible].
I believe that from what they
found in one of their innovations,
they actually changed the design of the program.
They found, for example, the evaluation
that men were actually more empowered,
they found out that it is because
the way the program was
implemented gave them more control over those results.
So they actually redesigned the program based on that,
but we are looking to expand
our testing and development for [inaudible].
Good morning.
My name is [inaudible] from [inaudible] States.
I have a question about the [inaudible] different angle.
We're looking at the impact of
some global patterns or
global trends on food and
nutrition in the [inaudible] South, in particular.
Looking at trade and tariff barriers, for example,
how that has impacted
basic growing and consumption of agriculture?
I'm thinking, for example,
of NAFTA and the impact of
corn production in Mexico where it was cheaper
to purchase corn produced in
Iowa than what's in their global regions.
I'm just thinking from a different scale but connecting
scales and how globalization and trade or tariffs,
in particular, can impact
all production and consumption in agriculture?
How that's factored into
your research [inaudible]
a bit broader scope in this organization?
One of the things I've learned as a researcher is
when if you don't know a topic, and this is one of them.
I would refer you, actually,
to my colleagues in
the market [inaudible] and solution division
with [inaudible] many of them have actually done.
I have some colleagues who have worked on
looking at gender-disaggregated, macro-monitoring.
I'm a micro person
so I'm not going to answer your question.
Thank you.
Hi. I'm Evelyn from [inaudible].
I'm sorry, where did you say?
Virginia Tech.
I have a question.
My research is related to a lot
of the things that you're doing,
except it's sort of the opposite.
I come from an agricultural science background and did
observation-based but based on survey work.
I applied positive [inaudible],
like the [inaudible] household surveys
sometimes or [inaudible].
The reason why I did it this way is because
my [inaudible] a community of [inaudible] and how can
we help smaller organizations
that don't have many resources,
let's say, think
Helen Keller [inaudible] USA-type of projects,
how they can demonstrate their impact effortlessly.
My question is, you do
baseline nutrition work and agriculture [inaudible]?
Then, what I [inaudible] as next step,
as in my career, that gradually, basically,
build development program based on positive results,
basically things that are already
working within the community.
How would you structure
a control group around something like that,
if you have different outcomes
and have different communities?
This is a very interesting question
and [BACKGROUND] it's something that we've encountered,
but we already have
a good solution too because we tend to
work with a research organization.
We have that in mind with large organization in scale,
but you're thinking a bit outside the box.
I think that if you can get the community,
and I think it's very important.
We can't expect the big organizations to work everywhere.
Empowerment is personal [NOISE] and very local,
so it's important for
the local community to be empowered.
I think there are two questions.
One is, do you
want to evaluate the local organization unit?
The other question is, are you
trying to build practices developed by them,
are your communities learning from all this?
Both.
Both, right?
Yeah.
[inaudible].
There's two premises.
One, we'd be hypothetically helping
small organizations to do their monitoring evaluations,
so that they can put funding without
hiring somebody expensive like us.
Then [inaudible] cling into
western world like [inaudible].
The other part of it is that [inaudible].
Here, I don't know if you can hear what that is,
but that change of public health paper theories,
save the children.
What they did is they went into a community from Vietnam
and they were given
one year to do their work as hard as they want.
They had basic pay, went into the communities,
and they found children that were less
malnourished than their families' poverty would predict,
and they had others that
the children were healthier than predicted.
They watched them, they did observation based-work,
and then they found a solution.
They found interventions from the mothers who gave birth.
Then they implemented community health program with that.
[NOISE] The difference is that
the communities have identified
those things on their own.
How does this affect us?
[OVERLAPPING] It's not an easy question.
No, it's not an easy question.
It's not an easy question,
and I actually think that this is
maybe a case where a very good well
done case study before taking part may be better for
an organization than service.
I think that they should
do everything because for
example if you're giving an injection,
you'll weigh a lot of things.
You would do [inaudible].
That's important.
You may not need to do scaled that
is with large populations.
A well designed case study that is
correctional then may be very good for
documentation purposes and multiple cases.
Do we have one more question?
Then we do have three major presentations before that,
so we're just going to have this one more.
She's going to do that when she comes back.
Good morning. My name is [inaudible], I'm from Iowa.
I'm here with [inaudible] from my university.
But my question is from your experience in representing,
how different are
the local interpretations of empowerment,
and how do you come up together with an index?
A better index?
Yeah. You mentioned that a lot of
interpretations brought understanding of empowerment.
How do you find that in an index?
I'm going to refer you to three papers which
just came up in three websites.
One is by [inaudible].
They're three papers which
are all about the development of
the project that [inaudible].
Basically, we use a quantitative data
to help identify
indicators which could go with the index,
but that's the thing about it.
Then the quantitative team
explored these concepts of
empowerment with the communities,
[NOISE] and we actually found that they help us.
You can even ask me a little bit about that later,
but the way the conceptualized empowerment
help us to choose
the indicators to introduce
the index and also how to interpret this index.
It's an iterative process.
[NOISE] I can't describe
it in five minutes because it's still going on.
We're still validating,
especially because it's continuing further.
We're not particularly pleased with
our indicators of collective agencies,
but do read about
how we did it and how we
are still trying to improve this.
I do think that the inputs from
the NGOs and projects will
include these dimensions of international economy,
attributes that were specified as disability.
I think putting them there was really key.
I think also the other thing
that it didn't emerge on this round of testing,
but the previous round was I think
that I would say
about five years ago or maybe 5-10 years ago,
the idea was that an asset and
a local control solely was really the important thing,
and I think that from the one that [inaudible] has come
with sharing goals and [inaudible].
As our work, we're understanding
that joint control of assets is also important,
but our indicators must control its own asset.
It shows that the woman is actually participating
in decision making or
an asset which might be quite important.
Does it matter for example,
I have sole control of buying asset,
is it more important I have
joint control over actually a really important asset.
These are things that can help
us not only forming a position index,
but also you could do a [inaudible].
Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]