Agnes R. Quisumbing

• PhD Economics
• Senior Researcher at International Food Policy Research Institute

This study examined modifiable caregiver factors influencing child development in Malawi using baseline data from 1,021 mothers and their children <2 years of age participating in a cluster‐randomized controlled trial implemented in rural Malawi (2022–2025). We fit an evidence‐based theoretical model using structural equation modelling examining fo...

This paper addresses women's empowerment in agriculture, innovations in its measurement, and emerging evidence. We discuss the evolution of the conceptualization and measurement of women's empowerment and gender equality since 2010. Using a gender and food systems framework and a standardized measure of women's empowerment, the Women's Empowerment...

In the context of rural Bangladesh, we assess whether agriculture training alone, nutrition behavior communication change (BCC) alone, combined agriculture training and nutrition BCC, or agriculture training and nutrition BCC combined with gender sensitization improve: (a) production diversity, either on household fields or through crop, livestock,...

We use a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh to compare two models of delivering nutrition content jointly to husbands and wives: deploying female nutrition workers versus mostly male agriculture extension workers. Both approaches increased nutrition knowledge of men and women, household and individual diet quality, and women's empowerm...

Background: Recent evidence suggests that diet inequities between men and women may have diminished within rural Bangladeshi households. However, this has not been directly tested with appropriate physiologic adjustments and it is unclear whether changes have occurred across socioeconomic strata. Understanding intrahousehold dietary patterns at di...

Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment in food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition, as well as more just, resilient and sustainable food systems for all. This chapter uses a scoping review to assess the current evidence on pathways between gender equality, women’s empowerment and food systems. The chapter use...

Microfinance groups are a prominent source of small-scale rural credit in many developing countries. In India, evidence of the impact of the now ubiquitous women-only savings and credit self-help groups (SHGs) on household consumption and asset accumulation is inconclusive and based on small-scale interventions. Further, little is known about the s...

Using the lens of the theory of induced innovation, we reflect on the development of metrics for women’s empowerment and gender equality. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), launched in 2012, was used to monitor women’s inclusion in agricultural sector growth. Demand by WEAI users and the supply of tools and methods from researcher...

In addition to the direct health impacts of COVID-19, government and household mitigation measures have triggered negative indirect economic, educational, and food and health system impacts, hitting low-and middle-income countries the hardest and disproportionately affecting women and girls. We conducted a gender focused analysis on five critical a...

In addition to the direct health impacts of COVID-19, government and household mitigation measures have triggered negative indirect economic, educational, and food and health system impacts, hitting low-and middle-income countries the hardest and disproportionately affecting women and girls. We conducted a gender focused analysis on five critical a...

Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment in food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition, and in more just, resilient, and sustainable food systems for all. This paper uses a scoping review to assess the current evidence on pathways between gender equality, women’s empowerment, and food systems. The paper uses an a...

Background Women's self-help groups (SHGs) have become one of the largest institutional platforms serving the poor. Nutrition behavior change communication (BCC) interventions delivered through SHGs may improve maternal and child nutrition outcomes. Objective To understand the effects of a nutrition BCC intervention delivered through SHGs in rural...

This paper studies the impact of climate change on the nutritional status of very young children between the ages of 0–3 years by using weather data from the last half century merged with rich information on child, mother, and household characteristics in rural coastal Bangladesh. We evaluate the health consequences of rising temperature and relati...

The importance of women’s roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women’s empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by t...

Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships...

Objectives Women's self-help groups (SHGs), which operate at large scale in India, are an important platform for delivering behaviour change communication (BCC) and social support interventions to rural women. Little is known about how such group-based interventions affect women's mental health and time use. Methods The Women Improving Nutrition t...

Objectives Women's self-help groups (SHGs) have become one of the world's largest institutional platforms of the poor, reaching over 70 million Indian women in 2020. Limited evidence exists on effects of nutrition interventions through SHGs on maternal and child nutrition outcomes. Methods The Women Improving Nutrition through Group-based Strategi...

This introduction to a special section describes how a recently developed measure, the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) can be used to assess empowerment impacts of agricultural development interventions in India and Bangladesh as well as broader changes in rural labor markets. The special section comprises three pa...

Both women and men are involved in agriculture globally, although their roles differ significantly by region and are changing rapidly. Gender shapes access to productive resources and opportunities, with women having less access to many assets, inputs, and services across a wide range of contexts. These gender differences in resources and opportuni...

Success of nutrition‐sensitive agriculture programmes targeted to women may be influenced by increased demands on women's and other household members' time and by time‐related trade‐offs to accommodate programme participation. However, evidence of how such programmes impact time use and whether changes in time‐related demands negatively influence m...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.018.].

Although women’s empowerment and gender equality are often linked with better maternal and child nutrition outcomes, recent systematic reviews find inconclusive evidence. This paper applies a comparable methodology to data on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), an internationally-validated measure based on interviews of women and m...

Using frameworks on gendered transitions to adulthood, we analyse nationally-representative, sex-disaggregated data from 36 countries to examine how structural transformation (share of GDP from non-agriculture) and rural transformation (agricultural value added per worker) are associated with landownership, labour force participation, and sector of...

This paper discusses the challenges associated with implementing time-use surveys among agricultural households in developing countries and offers advice on best practices for two common measurement methods: stylized questions and time diaries. Using data from Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) surveys in Bangladesh and Uganda, it find...

Common mental disorders (CMD) among mothers cause disability, negatively affect child development, and have high long-term economic costs. Little is known about how factors across multiple life dimensions, modeled together, are differentially related to maternal mental health in high poverty contexts. Further, there is limited evidence on determina...

Objectives Secondary data analysis in Bangladesh has found associations across agricultural production, women's empowerment, and nutrition outcomes. Less is known, though, about whether combining interventions across these areas is more effective than isolated interventions to improve agricultural diversity, diet diversity, and women's empowerment...

We examine the role of gender dimensions of intrahousehold bargaining power and decision making in the adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato (OSP), a biofortified crop being promoted to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A in Uganda. We use patterns of ownership and control of land and other assets by married men and women to create gender...

Women's participation and empowerment in value chains are goals of many development organizations, but there has been limited systematic, rigorous research to track these goals between and within value chains (VCs). We adapt the survey-based project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to measure women's and men's empowerment i...

Development is a multi-faceted process; achieving development goals thus requires a multi-sectoral approach. For over two decades, our research group of economists and nutritionists has designed and implemented randomized trials to assess the effectiveness of multisectoral programs in improving nutrition, food security, and other measures of well-b...

New data and new methods have provided many new insights into rural households in the past 50 years. We analyze what we have learned from household models since Boserup and Becker, using this to frame more recent findings about household behavior from three types of studies: observational studies, experimental games, and impact evaluations. More se...

With growing commitment to women's empowerment by agricultural development agencies, sound methods and indicators to measure women's empowerment are needed to learn which types of projects or project-implementation strategies do and do not work to empower women. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has been widely used, requir...

Effective agricultural extension is key to improving productivity, increasing farmers’ access to information, and promoting more diverse sets of crops and improved methods of cultivation. In India, however, the coverage of agricultural extension workers and the relevance of extension advice is poor. We investigate whether a women's self‐help group...

Objectives: The mental wellbeing of mothers with young children has been shown to positively affect child development. Little, however, is known about which factors are related to optimal maternal mental health in high poverty rural contexts where women face a broad array of challenges at multiple levels daily. Methods: Data were from 1644 mothe...

Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our understanding of ways in which SHGs improve awareness and use of...

Using nationally-representative survey data from rural Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women's empowerment in agriculture and indicators of individual dietary quality. Our findings suggest that women's empowerment is associated with better dietary quality of individuals within the household, but the strength of this association vari...

Using panel data from Ethiopia and Malawi, we investigate how youth migration affects household labour, hired labour demand, and income, and whether these effects vary by migrant sex and destination. Labour shortages arise from the migration of a head’s child. However, the migration of the head’s sons produces a greater burden, particularly on fema...

This article examines the relationship between empowerment gaps between spouses and children's nutritional status and education using nationally‐representative data from the 2012 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey. We measure relative empowerment of spouses using the recently‐developed Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index. We find that whil...

A growing number of governments, donor agencies, and development organizations are committed to supporting nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) to achieve their development goals. While consensus exists on pathways through which agriculture may influence nutrition-related outcomes, empirical evidence on agriculture's contribution to nutrition and...

The paper by Garcia and Wanner reviews examples of gender-responsive research and programming from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to discuss those gender-responsive approaches which are most successful for achieving women's empowerment in agricultural development. It notes accomplis...

Improving the nutritional status of women and children in South Asia remains a high public health and development priority. Women's groups are emerging as platforms for delivering health- and nutrition-oriented programs and addressing gender and livelihoods challenges. We propose a framework outlining pathways through which women's group participat...

Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG) on gender equality and women’s rights and at least 11 of the 17 SDGs require indicators related to gender dynamics. Despite the need for reliable indicators, stylized facts on women, agriculture, and the environment persist. This paper analyzes four gender myths: 1) 70% of the world’s poor are women; 2) Women pr...

This paper reviews the literature on women’s land rights (WLR) and poverty reduction. It uses the Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project (GAAP) conceptual framework to identify pathways by which WLR could reduce poverty and increase wellbeing of women and their households in rural areas. It uses a systematic review search methodology to identify pa...

A growing number of governments, donor agencies, and development organizations are committed to supporting nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) to achieve their development goals. Although consensus exists on pathways through which agriculture may influence nutrition-related outcomes, empirical evidence on agriculture’s contribution to nutrition a...

Using panel data, this paper tests whether shocks affect men's and women's assets differently in Bangladesh and Uganda. Across countries, covariate and idiosyncratic shocks have different effects on men's, women's, and jointly owned assets. Jointly held land and assets were better insured against food price increases in Bangladesh, unlike jointly h...

Ownership of assets is important for poverty reduction, and women’s control of assets is associated with positive development outcomes at the household and individual levels. This research was undertaken to provide guidance for agricultural development programs on how to incorporate gender and assets in the design, implementation, and evaluation of...

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyse the impact of an integrated agriculture and nutrition programme in Burkina Faso on women’s and men’s assets, and norms regarding ownership, use and control of assets. We use a cluster-randomised controlled trial to determine whether productive asset transfers and increased income-generating oppo...

We use household survey data from Nepal to investigate relationships between women’s empowerment in agriculture and production diversity on maternal and child dietary diversity and anthropometric outcomes. Production diversity is positively associated with maternal and child dietary diversity, and weight-for-height z-scores. Women’s group membershi...

A broad consensus has emerged among both policymakers and researchers that strengthening women’s property rights plays an important role in reducing poverty and achieving equitable growth. Despite the important role of land in rural livelihoods and as a form of wealth in many Asian cultures, surprisingly few nationally representative data exist...

Many development interventions target transfers to women. However, little evidence directly explores the “fly- paper effects” of whether women retain control over these transfers once within the household and how reallo- cation of the transfers affects women's empowerment. We study these dynamics in the context of BRAC's randomized CFPR-TUP program...

This paper investigates linkages between women’s empowerment in agriculture and the nutritional status of women and children using 2012 baseline data from the Feed the Future population-based survey in northern Ghana. Using a new survey-based index, the women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, we conduct individual-level analyses of nutrition-rela...

Lack of clarity behind measurement and interpretation of statistics on gender and land leads to an inability to clearly articulate a policy response to the potential inequalities faced by women and men. This article sets out to explore, conceptually and empirically, the levels and relative inequalities in land rights between women and men in Africa...

Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. In many contexts, ownership of assets is strongly gendered, reflecting existing gender norms and limiting women’s ability to invest in more profitable livelihood strateg...

This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data...

This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data...

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 col...

Most empirical investigations of the effects of cognitive skills assume that they are produced by schooling. Drawing on longitudinal data to estimate production functions for adult verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills, we find that: (1) School attainment has a significant and substantial effect on adult verbal cognitive skills but not on adult non...

Sustainability and gender have been prominent on the development agenda since the 1980s, but there has been little systematic study of the links between the two. This review draws on ecofeminist theory, feminist political ecology, intrahousehold literature, and natural resource management case studies and reviews to examine how gender shapes themot...

Using a nationally representative survey from Bangladesh, the paper presents how a recently developed index, Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), can be used to assess the extent of women's empowerment in agriculture and diagnose areas where gaps in empowerment exist so that programmes and policies can be targeted to those areas. While...

Using a nationally representative survey from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, measured using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and per capita calorie availability, dietary diversity, and adult body mass index (BMI). Accounting for potential endogeneity of empowerment, we find that incr...

This chapter focuses on the contemporary debate surrounding large-scale land deals (also called “land grabs”), an issue that is at the intersection of two themes central to Boserup’s oeuvre, specifically her work on agricultural intensification and her work on gender and rural development. In this chapter, Boserup’s theories of agricultural intensi...

In several African contexts, households are unable to enhance agricultural production due to land constraints. Few governments have explored the use of resettlement to alleviate land scarcity and facilitate rural-to-rural migration. We examine whether a resettlement project in southern Malawi improved food security in the long term. Our findings in...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, Gender in Agriculture: Closing the Knowledge Gap. The book grew out of collaborative work done for Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) flagship report, The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11, Women in agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development, highlig...

Social capital comprises the range of relationships, networks, and institutions that allow people to build trust and cooperation. This chapter documents gender differences in social capital related to agricultural development, defined as group membership and social networks, based on a critical literature review of key issues and a review of publis...

Because gender relations are complex and context-specific, nuanced, context-specific data collection and analytical methods are recommended. This chapter presents a suite of quantitative and qualitative methods for collecting and analyzing data on gender relations in agriculture. It begins with a detailed overview of how quantitative and qualitativ...

Because gender differences in access, control, and use of assets are pervasive in the agricultural sector, agricultural development interventions are likely to have gender-differentiated impacts. This chapter proposes a conceptual framework to explore the potential linkages between gender, assets, and agricultural development projects in order to g...

Land is one of the most fundamental assets in the agricultural sector because it is the gateway through which people gain access to many other assets and opportunities. This chapter examines gender and land issues, identifying the gender gap in land rights and examining ways to redress this gap. The first section frames the discussion in terms of t...

A paradigm shift is required in agricultural research, development, and extension (R, D, & E) systems in developing countries, from a focus on production toward a broader view of agriculture and food systems in which women’s distinct role in ensuring the food security of their households is better recognized. The authors develop a conceptual framew...

Policy interventions that improve women’s status and reduce gender inequalities are expected to contribute to the well-being of not only the women themselves but also their children. Because women have the responsibility of caring for children and preparing food for the household in many societies, they play a critical role in efforts to sustainabl...

Participation in value chains can help link smallholder farm households to markets, but little evidence exists on how implications differ for individuals within a household. We assess how participation in a dairy value chain project in rural Bangladesh affected asset ownership, decisionmaking, mobility, and time allocation across household members....

Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. Although value chain analysis has increasingly incorporated gender issues, the intersection between women’s asset endowments and their participation in market-oriented a...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) produced a 2011 report on women in agriculture with a clear and urgent message: Agriculture underperforms because half of all farmers—women—lack equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. This book builds on the report’s conclusions by providing,...

There is a high degree of interest in the potential for agricultural programs to be designed and implemented to achieve health and nutrition objectives. Policymakers have often looked to the experience of civil society organizations in designing and implementing such programs, particularly in different social and cultural contexts. For the past 20...

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), established in 1975, provides evidence-based policy solutions to sustainably end hunger and malnutrition and reduce poverty. The Institute conducts research, communicates results, optimizes partnerships, and builds capacity to ensure sustainable food production, promote healthy food systems,...

This paper starts by reflecting on the concept and measurement of women’s empowerment and then reviews some of the structural interventions that aim to influence underlying gender norms in society and eradicate gender discrimination. It then proceeds to review the evidence of the impact of three types of interventions—cash transfer programs, ag...

Growth failure is associated with adverse consequences, but studies need to control adequately for confounding. We related height-for-age z scores (HAZs) and stunting at age 24 mo to adult human capital, marriage, fertility, health, and economic outcomes. In 2002-2004, we collected data from 1338 Guatemalan adults (aged 25-42 y) who were studied as...

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) measures the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector and comprises two subindexes. The first assesses empowerment of women in five domains, including (1) decisions about agricultural production, (2) access to and decisionmaking power about productive resources, (3) c...

Using a longitudinal survey from rural Bangladesh, this article examines the determinants of land and asset accumulation over time and explores why some households may be trapped in asset poverty. Non-parametric and parametric methods are used to discern the shape of the asset accumulation path, and whether unique or multiple equilibria exist. We f...

This report has not been subject to a formal external review via IFPRI's Publications Review Committee. The report is circulated in order to stimulate discussion and critical comment. The views and opinions contained in the report are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by IFPRI or USAID.