Women’s empowerment in agriculture study- Feed the future Senegal–Naatal Mbay

In 2016 and 2017, the Feed the Future Senegal Naatal Mbay project, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), conducted a study on women’s empowerment in agriculture to determine the level of empowerment among participating households and to identify the main constraints to empowerment. The two phase study reached 938 respondents – 495 women and 443 men – who are the primary decision makers within their households, over the three geographic areas that make up the Naatal Mbay Zone of Influence (ZOI): the Senegal River Valley (SRV), the Southern Groundnut Basin (SGB), and Casamance. The study supplemented the quantitative data collected through the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) survey with qualitative methods, including 12 focus groups, 96 individual household interviews, and 80 interviews with other value chain actors. The study found that, overall, women surveyed within the project’s ZOI were relatively empowered, with an overall score of 0.783 out of a possible 1.0, and where 0.80 is considered adequately empowered. Some of the main constraints to empowerment identified by respondents included a lack of participation in household decision making on production, lack of involvement in community groups, and inadequate access to and management of agricultural credit. The data suggests that workload is not a major constraint to empowerment, though it has a greater burden on women in the rainy season, when agricultural activities are more time consuming. While land ownership was not found to be a major contribution to women’s disempowerment based on the quantitative data, women reported in interviews and focus groups that access to land is a major constraint. As expected, across all regions, the empowerment score for men is, on average, higher than the score for women.