Round I: Gender-disaggregated household survey data on rural women empowerment and technological change in wheat, Madhya Pradesh

Gender equality is an indicator of sustainable development and also a means toward it. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by United Nations is to achieve gender equality and empowerment of women and girls by 2030 (United Nations 2017). Empowerment of rural women is considered also as a necessary pre-requisite to attain food security and alleviate poverty in developing countries. While a number of studies address women empowerment as a developmental outcome, the deterministic role of rural women empowerment on agrarian development has not received sufficient research focus. On one hand, the quantitative empirical studies addressing technological change often limit the gender dimension to a binary variable on sex of the household head. The key roles and responsibilities of women members of the farm household, who are directly or indirectly involved in crop and livestock production, are overlooked by doing so. One the other hand, the in-depth qualitative case studies are not sufficiently broad (small sample size) to allow for generalization. Against this backdrop, the proposed study attempts to develop a mixed research methodology taking variables from quantitative household surveys and qualitative case studies for quickly and effectively capturing rural women involvement and empowerment and their ramifications on technological change and farmer livelihoods. The empirical analysis will be based on Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) and household survey data, conducted in the second half of 2018 in Madhya Pradesh (India), where wheat is one of the main crops. The study frame was built in close collaboration with the CGIAR Gender and Agriculture Research Network, and also be a ‘pilot’ study for identifying and integrating gender variables in the adoption-impact studies in CRP WHEAT and MAIZE Programmes. The overall objective of the project is to better understand the importance of women involvement in agriculture and women empowerment on technological change and rural livelihoods in India, focusing on impact heterogeneity and the role of different social institutions. There are two sets of research questions – first specific to the study area, and second more generic to the developing countries. The research questions specific to the study area are shown below. 1. Which of the individual / household / community characteristics are the key determinants of women empowerment in agriculture? 2. What role do gender plays on diffusion of varietal technologies and sustainable intensification practices in wheat? 3. What are the impacts of women empowerment and gender roles on household food insecurity? The more generic research questions are concerning (a) better technology targeting and (b) development of a variable set on gender to be used for quantitative data collection. The research questions framed in this connection are shown below. 4. How should the technology dissemination and targeting strategies change when the role, responsibilities, and preferences of women farmers are addressed? 5. Which are the easy to observe household attributes that could stand proxy for woman empowerment in quantitative studies on technological change? The empirical part of this study will be based on data collected from three districts of Madhya Pradesh, India – Jabalpur, Mandla and Damoh. Madhya Pradesh is one of the states with largest wheat growing area (19% of wheat area in India) but with lower wheat productivity (2.85 tons) compared to other major producers (4.29 tons in Punjab and 3.98 tons in Haryana in 2014-15 season). While Mandla and Damoh are lower productive districts within the state, Jabalpur farmers experience moderately high wheat productivity. Mandla and Damoh are also categorized as the disadvantaged districts by Government of India. The selected districts contain the three GENNOVATE case-study communities.