Exploring conference Theme 2: Advancing women’s empowerment in agri-food systems through scalable solutions

Diana is a development economist, focused on gender and impact evaluations, whose experience has focused specifically on generating evidence that can inform policies that address gender gaps.

Before joining the GENDER Accelerator a year ago as a senior scientist focused on impact assessments, Diana worked as an economist at the Africa Gender Innovation Lab of the World Bank.

“I joined the GENDER Accelerator to support how to generate and measure an impact on gender equality in agri-food systems,” Diana says.

“I love to see studies that go beyond simply characterizing the determinants of women’s economic empowerment or the gaps women face. Instead, I hope to see research that helps us better understand what works to close gender gaps and evaluate the impact of innovations aimed at empowering women.”

As Diana leads Theme 2 of the Gender in Food, Land and Water Systems Conference 2025, she sees how critical it is to address gender gaps in agri-food systems to achieve higher agricultural productivity: “Despite women contributing around 50% of the agricultural labor force in sub-Saharan African countries, significant gender gaps persist. Women farmers often lag in agricultural productivity, access to inputs, and the opportunity to exercise agency.”

Diana says that exercising agency is key. “Empowerment is not just about providing access to finance or resources, but about enabling women to make informed decisions. Empowering women and closing gender gaps in agri-food systems can bring enormous gains.”

The evidence backs this up: a study conducted in Nigeria showed that a 30% gender gap in agricultural productivity results in an estimated $2.3 billion in forgone earnings (0.6% of overall GDP). Closing this gap could increase the national GDP by up to 2.0%, or approximately $8.1 billion.

Diana cautions us to remember that empowering women:

• Is not just about better access to resources (you can read more in Naila Kabeer's seminal work)—it is about providing an enabling environment for them to exercise agency and make informed decisions.

• Requires engaging men as well—there is interesting literature highlighting the importance of involving men in interventions to empower women and how to engage them.

The conference, she says, will address these issues and help researchers and practitioners continue moving towards a better understanding of women’s empowerment in agri-food systems.

Important to this goal is also continually re-examining how the research community measures women’s empowerment, because of its complexity and multidimensional nature.

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and its adaptations have significantly advanced this ability to measure women's empowerment in agriculture, focusing on various types of agency. There is also a new initiative, MAGNET, working to advance how we measure women's economic empowerment—and a sub-tool to measure agricultural self-efficacy.

However, Diana points out remaining gaps in measuring certain dimensions of women's empowerment, such as measuring relational, psychological, and resilience dimensions. More tools are also needed for measuring the individual and collective voice of women, youth, and other groups.

When we asked Diana about what she is most interested in seeing within Theme 2 at the conference, she spoke about studies that test different approaches for disseminating information and improving technology adoption among women farmers.

“A recent impact assessment review by the GENDER Accelerator highlighted a limited number of impact assessments, especially causal impact assessments, on technology adoption,” she said. “Also, many existing assessments on this topic fail to measure impacts on women’s economic empowerment. I would love to see studies that address this gap.”