This report provides a summary of the baseline data from the pro-WEAI collected under the Nav Tejaswini project. It includes the following information: (i) overall context of India and Maharashtra with respect to gender equality and women’s empowerment; (ii) background of the project; and (iii) findings of women’s empowerment across dimensions of pro-WEAI and proposed recommendations for the project to improve the scores.
The analysis reveals that women are more disempowered than men in both project and comparison areas. The largest contributors to disempowerment for women and men are work balance and membership in influential groups. However, control overuse of income, self-efficacy, autonomy in decision making, inputs in productive decisions and group membership also contribute to the disempowerment. The disempowerment disparity between men and women is created owing to skewed scores across following domains: self-efficacy, attitudes about domestic violence, ownership of land and other assets, access to and decisions on credit, control over use of income, work balance, membership in influential groups, and respect among household members. These trends are similar in the comparison areas. These are important points of focus for Nav Tejaswini as the intervention can aim to improve across these domains to achieve greater women’s empowerment.
Citation: International Fund for Agricultural Development (2025). Programmatic Insights from a Project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI) Baseline Study in Maharashtra, India. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). ISBN: 978-92-9266-399-5.
