The present Guidelines form part of a joint effort by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) to help countries achieve indicator 5.a.2 of Target 5.a in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Target 5.a is to “Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance, and natural resources in accordance with national laws” and is measured by two indicators:

Indicator 5.a.1: (a) Percentage of people with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land (out of total agricultural population), by sex; and (b) share of women among owners or rights-bearers of agricultural land, by type of tenure.
Indicator 5.a.2: Proportion of countries where the legal framework (including customary law) guarantees women’s equal rights to land ownership and/or control.

Gender considerations are of utmost importance in agricultural technology development, dissemination and use, as these considerations confer good dividend to the overall impact of technology adoption. Hence, the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) Project consider gender as very important component and demand that gender should be integrated through designing and implementing interventions, amongst others.

To this effect, Capacity Development Outreach Compact (CDTO) delivery infrastructure led by Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) has included the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development, AWARD, to facilitate gender mainstreaming in all CDTO activities to support the mainstreaming of gender into the CDTO enabler compact of the TAAT. In partnership with AWARD, the CDTO compact enabler designed this gender mainstreaming guide to systematically incorporate consideration for gender-related dimensions and ensure equitable access to agricultural technologies.

As part of developing the gender mainstreaming guide, AWARD undertook a gender assessment targeting CDTO partners. The gender assessment weighed gender inclusion within organizational technical capacity, political will, organizational culture and accountability; this process included reviewing organizational policies, project documents, structures, operations and budget development.

Impact evaluations can produce useful insights on how to design programs and policies that can increase women’s and girls’ empowerment and help us better understand the process of empowerment itself. Yet, it can be challenging to design a measurement strategy and to identify indicators that capture changes in empowerment, that are tailored to the local context, and that minimize reporting bias. Pulling insights from diverse disciplines and the experience of J-PAL affiliated researchers around the world, this guide offers practical tips for overcoming these challenges in impact evaluations. We emphasize the importance of conducting in-depth formative research to understand gender dynamics in the specific context before starting an evaluation, developing locally tailored indicators to complement internationally standardized ones, and reducing the potential for reporting bias in our instruments and data collection plan. We do not provide a single set of ready-to-go survey instruments; instead, we outline a process for developing indicators appropriate to each study along with extensive examples. In this way, we hope this guide can help provide researchers and practitioners the tools to select or develop their own indicators of empowerment that are right for their impact evaluations.