CALL FOR PAPERS: India, Gender & Food Security Papers

CALL FOR POLICY BRIEFS/SHORT PAPERS

Open Window:  12 MAY 2016 – 27 MAY 2016

The India Food Security Portal,facilitated by IFPRI, is organizing a one day workshop on Gender and Food Security in India to be held on August 29 in New Delhi. As noted in a recent blog, women’s participation in food production often goes unrecorded but is critical to ensuring access and utilization of food in India. For this reason, a workshop entitled “Gender-Just Food Security” was held in December in Gujarat; for a summary of those discussions, visit our blog.  For this follow-up event, we plan to carry those discussions forward and bring together national policy makers, researchers, donors and implementers to present the most recent evidence on gender and food security in India that will contribute to the ongoing local policy debate.

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International Women’s Day 2016: Empowering women with data and evidence in Bangladesh

One of a researcher’s biggest fears is that research outputs go unread, gathering dust on people’s shelves before ending up in the recycling bin.  However, this fear was unfounded for our work on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has gone from esoteric research tool to a widely-used data collection tool that has inspired a new generation of policies and programs for women’s empowerment in Bangladesh.  Our long history of working in Bangladesh, coupled with an impressive record of policy engagement, made Bangladesh an ideal setting for asking the following research question:  How does one really empower women in agriculture?

Head over to IFPRI.org for the rest of the article. 

IFPRI Gender Methods Seminar: Good practices and lessons learned on gender and collective lands

Resource Equity with Landesa

Presentation by Elisa Scalise and Renee Giovarelli, Co-founders of Resource Equity

Chair: Agnes Quisumbing, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division

Discussant: Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI Environment and Production Technology Division

Monday, March 14, 2016, 12:00pm-1:00pm

Please find instructions for joining virtually at the end of this message.

Synopsis of the presentation:

Global awareness of two land tenure issues–the importance of recognizing and promoting land rights for women and the problem of insecure collective land and resource tenure rights–is rising. The importance of managing collectively held land, both for those who use it and for the environment, has grown increasingly clear. In fact, studies have estimated that as much as 65 percent of the world’s land is held under collective tenure—customary, community-based tenure systems. Securing that tenure is important for protecting the rights of those communities, and has been shown to improve resource management.

However, efforts to secure community land tenure, generally through documenting and registering rights, are still new. In particular, to date, the conversation around securing collective rights to land has paid little attention to women’s rights, and the effects of formalizing the rights of the collective on women are not well studied. Focusing on securing collective land and resource rights without considering gender differences within communities has the potential to severely disadvantage women who are very often socially, economically, and politically excluded.

This report on gender issues and best practices in collective land tenure projects seeks to begin filling this gap, by taking a detailed look at how six collective tenure land projects addressed gender differences. The six case studies include projects in China, Ghana, India, Kyrgyzstan, Namibia, and Peru. The case studies are program assessments focusing primarily on how each project approached gender, what the gender-differentiated impacts have been in terms of project participation and benefits, and what lessons can be learned and best practices can be drawn from these projects.

Empowerment matters: “Invisible Women” in Niger produce less food

Fleur Wouterse has a new blog published on Agrilinks discussing recent research using the WEAI in Niger. Her takeaway messages include:

Empowerment matters for agricultural production. Less empowered households experience lower returns to their labor and use their traction equipment and animals in a less effective manner. Women are much less empowered in so-called dual households where a primary male is also present. Increasing the empowerment of these women, for example, through leadership training or encouraging membership in groups (rotating savings schemes or producer organizations) will ultimately generate benefits in terms of increased food production.

Visit the IFPRI Slideshare site to view Fleur’s presentation on this work last year, available here.

Blogpost: Gender research beyond fairy tales: we can still do more and better

Isabel Lambrecht, Associate Research Fellow at IFPRI’s office in Ghana, writes about her choice to investigate gender in agricultural technology adoption. In this blogpost for Economics that Matters, she shares some surprises from what she has learned asking the question central to her dissertation, do we get higher uptake of agricultural technologies if agricultural extension programs work with only female farmers from a household, only male farmers, or both spouses jointly? Read the post here.

 

Job opportunity with IFPRI gender team

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) seeks a qualified candidate to serve as a Senior Research Assistant or Research Analyst in its Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division (PHND).  This is a two-year, fixed-term, renewable appointments. The positions will be based in Washington DC with travel overseas as needed. The final position title will be based on experience.  The successful candidate will work mainly on two projects:  the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (Phase II) and the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI).

Essential Duties:

Specific duties and responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Organize, clean, process and analyze household data sets and qualitative data.
• Prepare tables, graphs, and other outputs for reports.
• Assist in the preparation of project deliverables, presentations, briefs and papers.
• Conduct literature reviews and provide research assistance on gender issues in agriculture.
• Other duties as assigned.

 

Required Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in Economics, Agricultural Economics, Statistics, Public Policy, Epidemiology, or equivalent.

• At the Research Analyst level, a minimum of 3 years’ relevant post-Master’s experience is required.
• Strong background in gender and development issues, particularly in relation to agriculture in developing countries.

• Demonstrated experience working with quantitative data (data cleaning, management, analysis, etc.) at the household and individual (intra household) levels.
• Advanced STATA skills, including programming.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel.
• Fluency in written and spoken English.
• Ability and willingness to travel nationally and internationally as necessary.
• Demonstrated ability to work with minimal supervision.

 

Preferred Skills

• Fluency in one other language – preferably French.
• Experience with Access, VBA.

• Experience with data entry and CAPI software packages (CSPro, Surveybe, Epi Info, etc).
• Experience in proposal development and field research in developing countries.

• Knowledge of econometrics.
• Experience in survey design, questionnaire design, and conducting and supervising household surveys in developing countries; field experience related to gender issues.
• Training and experience in methods for designing and conducting causal impact evaluations, including randomized controlled trials (RCT), and other methods.
• Demonstrated strong writing skills.
• Ability to work well with multicultural and multi-disciplinary teams.

 

 

IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. The Institute conducts research, communicates results, optimizes partnerships, and builds capacity to ensure sustainable food production, promote healthy food systems, improve markets and trade, transform agriculture, build resilience, and strengthen institutions and governance. Gender is considered in all of the Institute’s work. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world, including development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, and farmers’ organizations. IFPRI is a member of the CGIAR Consortium.

 

TO APPLY:

 

IFPRI Employees:  Please send resume & cover letter via e-mail to Carla Tufano/Monica Dourado.

External Applicants: Go to www.ifpri.org . Click on “Careers” and then click on “Research” to link you to Position #15-171 – Senior Research Assistant/Research Analyst, (PHND).  Please complete on-line application, including a complete resume and a detailed letter of interest.  Also complete section providing 3 references. 

                                                                                                                    

For more information on IFPRI, please visit our website at www.ifpri.org 

New publication: Gender, headship, and the life cycle: Landownership in four Asian countries

Originally posted on the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) blog

Despite increasing evidence that households do not always function as one, policies regarding land and property rights are often formulated at the household level, assuming the primary adult male is the landowner. Because land policy reform has typically focused on changing household, rather than individual, rights to land, many of the data are collected at the household rather than the individual level. As a result of a combination of these factors, securing women’s land rights has remained a largely unaddressed issue by policymakers.

So as to inform the formulation of policies and interventions to strengthen women’s land rights, a new discussion paper by Kathryn Sproule, Caitlin Kieran, Agnes Quisumbing, and Cheryl Doss analyzes data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam to understand the processes by which men and women acquire land; the social, cultural, and legal institutions surrounding gender and landownership; and the role of individual and household characteristics influencing an individual’s ability to own land.

The authors’ finding that women own less land than do men across different household structures and that intrahousehold gender inequality is higher in households with larger landholdings suggests an agenda for future research and policy that strengthens women’s land rights within marriage, and protects them should the marriage dissolve.

Citation: Sproule, Kathryn; Kieran, Caitlin; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; and Doss, Cheryl. 2015. Gender, headship, and the life cycle: Landownership in four Asian countries. IFPRI Discussion Paper 1481. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/129823

This work was undertaken as part of PIM’s cross-cutting gender research.

Featured image: Calling it a day, Flickr, photo credit Staffan Scherz