Increasing Feed the Future Impacts through Targeted Gender Integration

On August 20th, the USAID Bureau for Food Security conducted a webinar on Feed the Future’s Gender Integration Framework. This webinar re-introduced the Gender Integration Framework& (GIF) as a tool to advance program design that promotes the Feed the Future objectives of improved agricultural productivity and inclusive agricultural growth through women’s economic empowerment.

The Gender Integration Framework facilitates a process to strategically examine programmatic needs and progress across key dimensions that contribute to women’s empowerment in agriculture. The GIF builds on the logic and results of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which tracks women’s empowerment and gender parity across five domains (production, resources, income, leadership, and time use).

The GIF is designed to be used by USAID Missions, Feed the Future team leads, agriculture officers, gender advisors, monitoring and evaluation specialists, USAID implementing partners, and the broader development community to identify problems and constraints to achieving their desired outcomes for increasing women’s empowerment in the agriculture sector; consider programming approaches to best address constraints; and think through the indicators needed to track progress in tackling those constraints.

The webinar reviewed the WEAI and GIF tools as it used program examples from USAID/Bangladesh to illustrate how the WEAI was used to drive current programming. The webinar also included Q&A with Bureau for Food Security technical advisors that support gender integration and the WEAI.