Chapter Five

Gender Equality

Women’s Empowerment for Rural Revitalization

Agnes Quisumbing, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Hazel Malapit

Formulating, implementing, and monitoring both programs and policies through the reach-benefit-empower lens can help assure that women’s needs are met and that women have greater capacity to contribute to rural revitalization.

KEY FINDINGS

Achieving gender equity and women’s empowerment is of intrinsic value to women and girls and a key step toward achieving many Sustainable Development Goals and rural revitalization.
Women and girls face a burden of time-consuming responsibilities, while controlling fewer resources and having less access to schooling, nonfarm jobs, and group membership, and less voice in governance and decisionmaking than men.
Growth of nonagricultural jobs in many regions has led to the “feminization” of agriculture, with women taking on more farm-related responsibilities, often without greater resources.

The reach-benefit-empower framework facilitates evaluation of how projects support women by ensuring their participation and that they receive benefits they value, and by strengthening their ability to make choices.
Policies create conditions for successful projects, and should also be evaluated with the reach-benefit-empower lens. For example, policies to reduce women’s domestic workload and to improve access to financial and agricultural services will facilitate empowerment.
Policies to empower women can promote rural revitalization by supporting environmental sustainability, agricultural transformation, and development of nonfarm opportunities for men and women.

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

Use a reach-benefit-empower framework to ensure that interventions move beyond nominal participation to real improvements in women’s lives.
Increase women’s effective voice through participation in formal governance structures, from local to national, and increasing women’s confidence to become politically involved.

Improve data and evidence relevant to increasing equality, particularly sex-disaggregated data and impact evaluation of programs and policies for women’s empowerment.
Include men and boys when designing projects and policies for women to reduce backlash and encourage changes in gender norms.

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