RE: Are agriculture programs supporting women to improve their livelihood? | Eval Forward

As a follow up to my earlier post, I’d like to share some of the lessons from the evaluation of the Joint Programme on Rural Women Economic Empowerment in implemented by UN Women, FAO, IFAD and WFP.

In Rwanda, the Programme targeted the most marginalized women in society (e.g. single mothers, HIV+ women, former sex workers) to support their empowerment and participation in agribusiness enterprises.

Targeting vulnerable and marginalized women requires substantial resources and the need to address the whole Theory of Change for impact-level results. 

 Some of the challenges and limitations that the evaluation found were the following:

 i) Women face more individual barriers to training attendance and knowledge transfer, due to their heavy workload on both productive and domestic tasks. In addition, the low literacy level of the target group curtails their progress into leadership roles and influences male perceptions regarding women capacity to lead. Women engaged felt it difficult to attend trainings and group meetings, as well as find time for making productive decisions regarding harvests, assets, and credit and participate in community leadership. This compromised women empowerment and limited their subsequent integration into other programmes targeting larger groups of beneficiaries.

ii) In some cases, recruiting marginalized groups into cooperatives resulted in unintended effects at the onset of activities, such as increased experience of social stigma or household disputes as a result of being included in public spaces; such cases call for more attention to culturally-sensitive initiatives and for awareness raising that goes beyond the target group involving the whole community.   

iii) While the evaluation found evidence that beneficiaries were increasing their agricultural production as a result of their participation in programme activities, there was less evidence to suggest that they were individually diversifying their agricultural products and breaking into agri-business and self-employment as expected. Notably, diversification of production has largely occurred at a small-scale through kitchen gardens, varying the types of nutritious foods consumed within household but not translating into opportunities to start processing activities. This limited development into agribusiness despite training and equipment provided was also partly due to the fact that beneficiaries were not adequately prepared to respond to market demand in terms of quantity and consistency of supply and of certification of products.

iv) Evidence from the evaluation also indicates that although funding gaps limited programme effectiveness and efficiency in Rwanda, notable progress has been made in increasing women’s production and access to finance, thereby increasing women’s experienced incomes and financial independence. Fewer results related to leadership and policy change, as well as other longer-term outcomes, such as increased and sustainable market access and agro- processing leading to market-responsive business creation and income-generation were realized.