Despite the recognized importance of women in agrifood systems (AFS), global estimates of their employment—particularly in the off-farm segment—remain scarce. This study addresses this gap by developing an empirical methodology to generate sex-disaggregated AFS employment estimates worldwide, leveraging data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Using this approach, we construct a novel sex-disaggregated dataset covering 183 countries from 2000 to 2021, including a balanced panel of 143 countries covering 93 percent of the global population. Our findings show that in 2021, AFS employed 43 percent of working men and 40 percent of working women globally, reflecting a decline of 12 percentage points since 2000, driven primarily by reductions in agricultural employment. Women accounted for 41 percent of the off-farm AFS workforce, with higher shares in lower-income regions. However, both men and women in agriculture remain concentrated in vulnerable self-employment, including contributing family work. While off-farm AFS offers more wage employment opportunities, women remain disproportionately disadvantaged in accessing these jobs, underscoring persistent gender disparities across regions. These findings provide the first global, sex-disaggregated evidence on AFS employment trends and highlight the need for targeted policies to enhance women's participation and economic opportunities, particularly within higher-value segments of AFS.

This paper provides empirical micro-level evidence on the gendered impacts of armed conflict on economic activity in agriculture and other sectors, combining large-N sex-disaggregated survey data with temporally and spatially disaggregated conflict event data from 29 African countries. We find that local conflict exposure is only weakly related to labour-force participation, but strongly reduces the total number of hours worked and increases engagement in the agricultural sector. These net impacts exist for both men and women. However, the reduction in hours worked is significantly greater among men, while the increase in agricultural activity is significantly greater among women. In the longer term, impacts of conflict on employment two years later are stronger when no more conflict ensues than if further conflict occurs, challenging the widespread idea of one-off conflict shocks fading away over time and suggesting that labour markets adapt to and absorb lasting conflict situations. Different types of conflict event have qualitatively similar impacts, which are strongest for explosions, such as from air strikes or landmines. Overall, our findings underline that armed conflict entails structural economic, social and institutional change, which creates complex, gendered impacts on economic activity.

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Microfinance is thought to be an effective tool for empowering women. Yet, previous studies that evaluate microfinance programs have mixed findings. This is in part because there are large variations in the interventions that are evaluated, but also that there is not a standardized metric of empowerment that is implemented consistently throughout the literature. This study investigates the effectiveness of a joint United Nations program aimed at empowering rural women through women-run rural savings and credit cooperatives in Oromia, Ethiopia, using the project-Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index. Building on more than a decade of studies and validation of different versions of the Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index, the tool aims to provide a standardized and comparable metric of women’s empowerment that is flexible enough to measure impacts of development projects. This study finds that the program had a positive impact on intrinsic agency for the beneficiaries with continued access to credit through the RUSACCOs between the baseline and endline. For this group of beneficiaries, the program seemed to increase the trust and respect between spouses. There is a second group of beneficiaries that appeared to have dropped out at the initial stages of the program or lost access to credit, suggesting there may have been problems with the program or possible resistance by spouses or community members. The study expands our understanding of how to measure women’s empowerment impacts of development projects within the context of a smallholder agricultural households.

Climate change is expected to increase the risk in agricultural production due to increasing temperatures and rainfall variability. Smallholders can adjust by diversifying income sources, including through migration. Most existing studies investigate whether households send a migrant after experiencing weather shocks, but the literature lacks evidence on migration as an ex-ante measure. In this paper, we disentangle the direct effect of weather shocks on income from agriculture from the effect of changing weather patterns over a few years on migration as a diversification strategy. Using a novel household survey from Nepal combined with 35 years of rainfall and temperature data, we model migration and agricultural production using a simultaneous estimation methodology. The results confirm the simultaneity of these decisions and show that increasing uncertainty in weather patterns and a warming climate increase outmigration in rural Nepal. These results are in line with the hypothesis that migration acts as an income diversification strategy under climate change.

Using the project-Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI) survey tool developed by GAAP2, this study aims to estimate the impact of a microfinance ‘plus’ programme on women’s economic empowerment in communities in Oromia and Afar, Ethiopia. The programme incorporates multiple interventions, which are implemented through women-run rural savings and credit cooperatives (RUSACCOs), with the intention of improving beneficiary women’s decision-making over productive assets, control over income, and leadership in rural institutions. A major component of the programme is aimed at rural women’s greater access to credit, but interventions also include agricultural livestock and technology transfers, business training, as well as a community gender awareness component. A difference-in-difference estimator with Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) is used to evaluate the impact of the programme on women’s empowerment in Oromia. Because of conflict in the area, baseline data collection was delayed and data was collected after some interventions had already begun in Oromia. As such, nearly all beneficiaries already had access to credit through the RUSACCOs at baseline, and both women and men were already empowered in a number of dimensions at baseline. Among households with beneficiaries who continued in good standing between baseline and midline, the programme positively contributed to both women’s and men’s empowerment with regards to respect among household members. It did not lead to additional impacts in terms of overall empowerment and gender parity within the household or across the other pro-WEAI indicators. However, it appears that, by maintaining good standing in the RUSACCOs, female participants were able to maintain high levels of empowerment across the other indicators. A second group of beneficiary women, who either chose to leave the RUSACCO or did not maintain good standing as a member, were also highly empowered across many dimensions at baseline but experienced large average decreases in empowerment across a number of indicators by midline. In Afar, using the midline data only, a single-difference estimator with Inverse Probability Weighting is used to evaluate the impact of the programme. In Afar, the programme had a significant impact on women’s overall empowerment. As we expected, given the nature of the programme, there were significant positive results in terms of access to and decisions on financial services, group membership, and membership in influential groups. There were also positive impacts on control over the use of income, suggesting that the programme contributed to greater control over the use of the output from agricultural activities and control over income from agricultural and non-agricultural activities. On the other hand, the programme also appears to have resulted in reduced empowerment on average with regards to autonomy in income.

In Nepal, as in many developing countries, male outmigration from rural areas is significant and is rapidly transforming the sending communities. Using primary data collected from households in rural Nepali communities, this study analyzes the effects of male out-migration from rural agricultural areas on women’s and men’s work on and off the farm. Using an instrumental variable approach to correct for endogeneity related to outmigration, the study finds differential impacts on agricultural labor for the men and women who remain. Men reduce labor in non-farm work without significantly increasing their labor allocation to other activities. Women, on the other hand, increase their work on the farm taking on new responsibilities and moving from contributing family workers to primary farmers. Despite their growing roles as primary farmers, women in households with a migrant do not increase their work in higher value activities, and remain predominantly concentrated in producing staple grains. The analysis highlights the importance of recognizing the changing roles of rural women, especially with respect to the management of the family farm, but it also raises questions about the sustainability and resilience of rural livelihoods to shocks in remittance incomes.

Attention to the implications of rural outmigration is growing, but little evidence exists on its association with women in agriculture. Migration affects women’s work and empowerment mainly through the loss of migrants’ labor and through the flow of remittances. The fact that migration may alter women’s intrahousehold decision-making processes has received limited coverage and attention. It is also important to distinguish between the various aspects of empowerment. The complex issue of rural outmigration also has implications for household food security. To address these existing knowledge gaps in a framework that combines gender, migration, and food security, this study exploits a rich, comprehensive survey that collected detailed information on all types of outmigration from rural areas in Nepal and Senegal. The objective of this study is to examine the linkages between migration and women’s work and empowerment in agriculture in Nepal and Senegal. In particular, this analysis seeks to understand: (i) how outmigration influences women’s work in agriculture; (ii) the consequences of male-dominated migration on gender roles and women’s empowerment; and (iii) whether and how outmigration impacts household food security. The study finds that male outmigration from rural, primarily agricultural areas is not linked to a decrease in women’s employment, but it is associated with significant changes in women’s roles in agriculture. The study reveals that male-dominated outmigration may not always be associated with women’s empowerment. The consequences of migration on household food security are country-specific and mediated by the receipt of remittances.

The way a household copes and withstands with economic shocks depends on the available options in terms of capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities. A livelihood strategy is the way those options are arranged and selected. Comprehending the driving factors of each livelihood strategy is crucial for improving the response mechanisms related to poverty and food security in developing countries. This paper aims at empirically measuring the outcomes of different livelihoods strategies in terms of household resilience to food insecurity in the specific context of Kenyan households. Kenyan households are classified according to their own livelihood strategies using the Ward's cluster analysis technique on data from the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey 2005-06. The information on shares of income sources, productive assets and occupational activities have been used to let the data identify the most meaningful and homogeneous groupings of Kenyan households in terms of livelihood strategies: pastoralist, agro-pastoralist, small-holder farmers, large-holder farmers, entrepreneurs and wage- employees. In order to understand the key determinants of each livelihood strategy and compare different livelihood strategies, we used and updated the resilience analysis framework developed by Alinovi et al. (2008). Comparing resilience by livelihood clusters in the eights provinces of Kenya shows there are significant differences across provinces and among clusters. Nairobi is by far the most resilient province and Eastern province the least one. Moreover, the large-holder farmers' cluster is the most resilient whilst the pastoralist is the least one. However, the determinants of resilience are different per each livelihood group. Those differences are relevant in terms of policy implications, considering the differences between the ultimate determinants of each component. In terms of access to basic services, for example, access to credit is much more relevant to pastoralists and large-holders than others. Access to water is more relevant to both farmer groups and agro-pastoralists, while access to electricity and telephone network is relevant to entrepreneurs and wage- employees. The social safety nets (transfers per capita) for wage-employees are twice as much than for other groups: this is related to urban poverty, where the lack of other assets (land, livestock, etc.) reduces dramatically the urban poor coping capacity.

Households’ welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008. In this paper, we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short-time effects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments, as a measure of welfare. The analysis consists of first approximating complete food-demand systems and then performing household level micro-simulations. Instead of focusing on a single country profile, we provide a more complete snapshot by comparing the evidence through a cross-country assessment made possible by the use of nationally representative household surveys. Comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data. We find that food price spikes not only reduce the mean consumption of dietary energy, but also worsen the distribution of food calories, further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations. We also discovered that access to agricultural land plays a significant role in ensuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas, and surprisingly, even in urban areas.

Most of the current literature on food security focuses on assessing household vulnerability in food-insecure regions. However, although the concept of vulnerability is dynamic and forward-looking, almost all statistical methodologies applied until now have been static and unable to predict future events. The main reasons for this are conceptual – for example, arising from the complexity (multidimensionality) of the concept of food security and the unpredictability of the many shocks that cause food insecurity – and empirical, such as the absence of longitudinal data over sufficiently long periods to identify the various sources of risk and thereby allow the analysis of trends and risks. The concept of resilience has recently been introduced into food security literature. It aims to measure households’ capability to absorb the negative effects of unpredictable shocks, as a legitimate component of vulnerability analysis. The definition of resilience to food insecurity has a direct effect on the methodology used to measure it, and the model described in this document, considers resilience to be a latent variable defined according to four building blocks: income and food access; assets; access to public services; and social safety nets. Two additional dimensions – stability and adaptive capacity – cut across these building blocks and account for households’ capacity to respond and adapt to shocks; these too are latent variables. To measure the whole system, two approaches can be pursued. The first measures each dimension separately using different multivariate techniques (factor analysis, principal components analysis and optimal scaling) before estimating the resilience index; the classification and regression tree (CART) methodology has also been used for the understanding of the process. The second approach measures all the dimensions simultaneously through structural equation models, and is based on normality assumptions on observed variables. As most of the variables in resilience measurement are ordinal or categorical, the first approach was adopted in this document. The role of the estimated resilience index in measuring vulnerability to food insecurity was then assessed through a regression model with food consumption in logarithmic scale as a dependent variable and the resilience index and other household characteristics as independent variables. The document also discusses the policy implications of resilience, using the results of testing the methodology in the Palestinian context.

The way a household copes and withstands with economic shocks depends on the available options in terms of capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities. A livelihood strategy is the way those options are arranged and selected. Comprehending the driving factors of each livelihood strategy is crucial for improving the response mechanisms related to poverty and food security in developing countries. This paper aims at empirically measuring the outcomes of different livelihoods strategies in terms of household resilience to food insecurity in the specific context of Kenyan households. Kenyan households are classified according to their own livelihood strategies using the Ward’s cluster analysis technique on data from the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey 2005-06. The information on shares of income sources, productive assets and occupational activities have been used to let the data identify the most meaningful and homogeneous groupings of Kenyan households in terms of livelihood strategies: pastoralist, agro-pastoralist, small-holder farmers, large-holder farmers, entrepreneurs and wageemployees. In order to understand the key determinants of each livelihood strategy and compare different livelihood strategies, we used and updated the resilience analysis framework developed by Alinovi et al. (2008). Comparing resilience by livelihood clusters in the eights provinces of Kenya shows there are significant differences across provinces and among clusters. Nairobi is by far the most resilient province and Eastern province the least one. Moreover, the large-holder farmers’ cluster is the most resilient whilst the pastoralist is the least one. However, the determinants of resilience are different per each livelihood group. Those differences are relevant in terms of policy implications, considering the differences between the ultimate determinants of each component. In terms of access to basic services, for example, access to credit is much more relevant to pastoralists and large-holders than others. Access to water is more relevant to both farmer groups and agro-pastoralists, while access to electricity and telephone network is relevant to entrepreneurs and wageemployees. The social safety nets (transfers per capita) for wage-employees are twice as much than for other groups: this is related to urban poverty, where the lack of other assets (land, livestock, etc.) reduces dramatically the urban poor coping capacity.