The Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) Activity enhances gender equality and women’s empowerment in agriculture programs by providing targeted technical assistance to and implementing partners, the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS), and other USAID operating units to increase women’s participation, productivity, profit, and benefit in agricultural systems. AWE builds capacity, provides tailored technical support, and generates, synthesizes, and shares evidence and good practices promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, especially in the domains of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index and the Gender Integration Framework.
Feed the Future AWE operates through call orders, which have supported:
- A rapid learning needs assessment to identify USAID staff’s gender equality and women’s empowerment capabilities related to agriculture in Feed the Future target countries.
- Quarterly newsletters providing technical guidance on incorporating a gender and social inclusion lens to programming and best practices to advance women’s empowerment in agricultural, food, and market systems programming.
- A virtual learning series and tools for USAID Missions and implementing partners on co-creating program designs, conducting inclusive market research, and measuring transformational results with the private sector, including how programs can engage the private sector to achieve inclusive development results.
- A gender and youth assessment and case studies for a USAID Mission to identify and prioritize behaviors that support and hinder women’s and youth’s engagement and empowerment in food security, agriculture, and nutrition-sensitive programming. The Mission used the assessment to inform its work to support and enable women, men, and youth to fully participate in food security activities.
- A research synthesis that analyzed the RFS Research Division’s portfolio to learn the extent and nature of gender integration in agricultural research investments and capture good approaches and lessons.
- The Toolkit to Address Gender-Based Violence in Agriculture and Market Systems Development (MSD), providing practical how-to guidance for agriculture and MSD project technical staff and gender and social inclusion advisors. AWE pilot tested the toolkit and also developed a resource compendium and other resources to support practitioners.
- A landscape analysis exploring women’s empowerment in beyond production activities and an impact assessment that focuses on a soy kit intervention in Malawi.
- An evidence scan report and summary deck and set of resource notes on promoting women’s decision-making power in agriculture, targeting USAID staff and programs.
- A landscape analysis and set of case studies exploring women and youth inclusion in market systems development programs, including a set of visualizations on gender and youth in market systems.
- A research report and two case studies addressing the knowledge gaps on how agriculture and food systems programs address women’s financial exclusion through financial platforms and if and how these promote women’s economic empowerment.
- A roundtable discussion series on gender-based violence, social inclusion, and intersectionality to be held in 2022–2023; and an upcoming training for RFS on how to design and implement agricultural and food system programs through a social inclusion lens.
For more information visit AWE’s Agrilinks page.
EnCompass partners with ACDI/VOCA, MarketShare Associates, and FHI 360 to implement AWE.
Photo by Morgana Wingard, c/o USAID/Bangladesh, via Creative Commons