Alessandra Galie

The empowerment of women in the livestock sector is fundamental to achieve gender equality. It also is instrumental for increased household productivity and improved household health and nutrition. Diverse strategies exist to empower women, yet these strategies are difficult to prioritize without a reliable and adapted means to measure women's empowerment. One quantitative measure is the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Despite its reliability in certain agricultural contexts, the WEAI requires adaptation in settings where livestock farming is the dominant form of livelihood. Using the WEAI as a starting point, a multidisciplinary team of researchers developed the Wom-en's Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI), a new index to assess the empowerment of women in the livestock sector. This paper presents the WELI and the dimensions of empowerment it includes: (1) decisions about agricultural production; (2) decisions related to nutrition; (3) access to and control over resources; (4) control and use of income; (5) access to and control of opportunities; and (6) workload and control over own time. The paper illustrates the use of the WELI by introducing pilot findings from dairy smallholders in four districts of northern Tanzania. The paper addresses considerations for the appropriate use and adaptation of the WELI to balance the needs for context specificity and cross-cultural comparisons; it also discusses its limitations. The paper recommends participatory and qualitative methods that are complementary to the WELI to provide context-specific insights on the processes of women's empowerment in the livestock sector.

Background: Productive resources are essential to the livelihoods and food security of the world’s rural poor.
Gender-equal ownership of resources is considered key to increasing agricultural productivity, equity, and food
security. However, there has not been much research about local understandings of ownership particularly in the
Global South. In addition, research is also lacking about how concepts of ownership affect food security at the
household level.
Results: This paper discusses the variability of local understanding of ownership by showing seven domains
resource ownership was associated with by a small cohort of respondents. It shows the flexibility of systems
governing resource entitlements among the studied communities and their impact on food security. It shows
that, irrespective of these understandings and systems, resource arrangements favored men.
Conclusions: The authors argue that an understanding of local meanings of ownership might reveal important
and unnoticed aspects of resource allocation, as well as provide guidance for initiatives that seek to provide locally
relevant approaches to improving gender equity.

The objective of this paper is to describe the process and the results of the evaluation of the knowledge sharing (KS) during and after an International Farmers' Conference organized at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and involving over 50 farmers and researchers from Algeria, Canada, Egypt, Eritrea, France, Iran, Italy, Jordan, and Syria. Storytelling was chosen by the participants, who set the agenda of the topics to be discussed, as the main framework to exchange farmers' knowledge. The evaluation was based on the anecdotal feedback from the participants gathered during the conference, shortly after the conference, and about a year later and on a questionnaire distributed to 64 non-participating farmers to evaluate the diffusion of the knowledge shared at the conference and its effect on farmers' practices. The narratives that were collected in the evaluation were grouped into categories that illustrate several dimensions of impact such as: acquired knowledge and practices, value added for participants, learning and dissemination of knowledge, network sustainability, change in perception of gender roles, impact on research and effectiveness of KS tools approach. The main results from the survey including participants and non-participants were that 57% of participants (respondents) changed their agricultural practices, all respondents told stories about the conference to others; 71% changed their mind about women's knowledge and role in agriculture, and over three quarters stayed in touch with one or more participants. While Storytelling proved an effective means to facilitate knowledge sharing during and after the Conference, documenting local knowledge remains a challenge as important exchanges might occur outside the formal presentations.