How do we better measure and track impact? Top 10 reads on gender and impact

The term “impact”  is a word we constantly hear and read: achieving impact, measuring impact, quantifying impact, scaling impact and more. Impact can sometimes seem overused and its meaning is often unclear. What does impact mean to gender equality in agri-food systems?

The following list includes key readings to better understand what impact is, how to integrate gender more effectively into impact assessments (particularly causal quantitative impact assessments), and key readings on studies that have tested the effectiveness (estimating the impact) of interventions aiming to foster women’s empowerment and reduce gender gaps.

#1

The handbook Impact Evaluation in Practice (2016) is an excellent starting point for understanding impact evaluation, clarifying key concepts such as the counterfactual and the distinction between attribution and contribution. While acknowledging that the methods discussed are not exhaustive due to new developments over the last ten years, it still effectively explains the core methods available for rigorous analysis.

#2

A Practical Guide to Measuring Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in Impact Evaluations gathers insights from the experiences of researchers around the world affiliated with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). The guide offers practical tips for how to integrate and measure women’s and girls’ empowerment in impact evaluations and is designed to support monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practitioners, researchers and students. The guide addresses key questions such as why gender is important to integrate into impact assessments (e.g., a fertilizer program may increase women’s weeding responsibilities) and what empowerment is. It stresses that it is critical to consider gender in impact measurement and analysis and to use a large enough sample to detect important gender differences. Based on these experiences, the guide proposes four steps to develop a strategy for integrating and measuring women’s empowerment in causal quantitative impact assessments. The appendix offers a practical list of survey questions and modules that are helpful to use in impact assessments to measure women’s empowerment.

#3

The report Levelling the field: improving opportunities for women farmers in Africa is a robust assessment of the gender gaps in agricultural productivity across six African countries (Ethiopia, Niger, Nigeria, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda). It also uses decomposition analysis to identify the precise factors responsible for the gender gap in each country. Building on evidence from causal impact assessments, the report sets out concrete policy proposals to address the main constraints facing women farmers. These proposals highlight both promising interventions—defined as those supported by at least one impact evaluation with a credible counterfactual—and emerging new ideas that currently lack direct, rigorous evidence of impact on gender agricultural productivity outcomes.

#4

This overview Engaging men for women’s economic empowerment: overview of the evidence examines evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches to engage men in promoting women’s economic empowerment. Studies evaluating the impact of adding a component that engages men to complement programs designed to support women’s individual economic activities show mixed results; however, those studies that assessed the impact of complementing support for household production or consumption with encouraging cooperative management or joint planning suggest promising results, especially for increasing women’s role in managing household resources. The evidence is very limited about the effectiveness of interventions that encourage men to recognize or enhance their wives’ rights to ownership of important assets.

#5

This thematic policy note, Addressing Care to Accelerate Equality, highlights the crucial importance of the care economy for women’s economic empowerment and builds on existing evidence from impact evaluations, suggesting effective interventions for addressing care needs and improving caregivers’ economic participation. These interventions include investing in affordable, quality, center-based and long-term child care insurance; implementing employer-supported policies like paid parental leave and flexible work options; and addressing the underlying social and gender norms that confine care to  “women’s work”, because removing physical constraints alone is insufficient to boost women’s labor force participation.

#6

Women remain underrepresented in leadership positions worldwide, facing persistent barriers across politics, business, and community organizations that limit both access to roles and influence in decision-making. Promoting Women’s Leadership is a global review of impact evaluations of policy interventions designed to increase women’s participation in leadership roles addressing three main questions: how effective are these interventions in increasing women’s presence in leadership? Under what conditions does descriptive participation translate into substantive influence? And what unintended consequences can arise from the interventions? This review provides a summary of the evidence on the effectiveness of policies such as gender quotas, role models and training programs, identifying not only gaps where evidence is required but also informing policymakers about what works.

#7

Enhancing agency and empowerment in agricultural development projects synthesized 11 mixed-methods impact evaluations from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2) project using the pro-WEAI to assess impacts on women’s empowerment. The synthesis found the most common positive impacts were on instrumental and collective agency, often due to the group-based approaches used. The overall mixed, and often null, impacts on the aggregate pro-WEAI underscore the need for projects to explicitly design strategies for empowerment, rather than assuming that programs reaching women will automatically empower them. It summarizes the impacts of 11 agricultural projects on women’s economic empowerment, highlighting the type of agency targeted and the impact observed.

#8

Based on the results from impact evaluations run by the Gender Innovations Labs of the World Bank Policy Lessons on Agriculture summarizes key findings related to what works (and what doesn’t work) to narrow gender productivity gaps. It provides a summary of the effectiveness of different interventions tested, identifying what works and what doesn’t seem to work to close gender gaps in agriculture. The note shows that extension services can be more cost-effective by targeting only women and leveraging their social networks. It also finds that couples’ training effectively fosters women’s participation in cash crop production, increasing overall farm production and investment and digital technologies can reduce information barriers and encourage women to access new markets, improving knowledge and intra-household decision-making.

#9

Based on the results from impact evaluations run by the Africa Gender Innovation Lab of the World Bank,  Policy Lessons in Women’s Property Rights  summarizes key findings about what works (and what doesn’t work) to enhance women’s property rights. Information and behavioral nudges and correcting misperceptions on norms seem to be effective approaches. For example, providing persuasive information to men about the benefits of co-titling land and requiring the wife’s presence during titling interactions proved to be effective in Uganda. It constitutes a key resource to learn about promising interventions and approaches to improving women’s property rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.

#10

Produced by the FAO, Impact evaluation of agricultural interventions is a technical guide with a comprehensive overview of impact evaluation concepts, including defining the counterfactual and managing selection bias for agricultural projects. It details various experimental and quasi-experimental methods like randomized control trials, difference-in-difference, and the integration of geospatial data for evaluation. The guide also addresses critical program implementation aspects, such as developing a theory of change, data sampling, power calculations, and incorporating gender analysis. This guide, together with #1, constitutes a key resource to better understand what an impact evaluation is and the methods available.