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The Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), has introduced a new tool – the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) – to strengthen the evaluation and advancement of women’s empowerment across various dimensions.
Image Source: PIDS
The Philippines faces a significant data gap in assessing women’s empowerment, particularly in agriculture, due to the lack of comprehensive, nationally representative data. PIDS, in collaboration with IFPRI, introduced WEMNS as a significant advancement in this area. WEMNS enhances the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). This 2012 tool that measured women’s inclusion in agriculture through household surveys but was unable to fully capture the complexity of women’s empowerment.
Empowerment encompasses household decision-making and includes time allocation, access to financial services, property rights, and freedom from violence. Incorporating new indicators that assess intrinsic and instrumental agency, like women’s life choices and community organization participation enables a deeper understanding of women’s constraints and how these affect their overall empowerment. Building on the foundation of WEAI, WEMNS offers a more comprehensive and adaptable tool for wider applications.
WEMNS was developed to evaluate empowerment in four key areas including, (1) inner strength, (2) practical capabilities, (3) collective influence, and (4) access to resources. Policymakers can greatly benefit from this design, which streamlines data collection processes while retaining the essential dimensions of women’s empowerment. The leaner tool may be used at scale and is appropriate for national statistical systems with effective pilot programs in Bangladesh, Malawi, Napalm, and Guatemala. These pilot programs showed that WEMNS could be less resource-intensive and capable of providing actionable insights into women’s empowerment. However, without consistent and reliable indicators, efforts to track and promote gender equality risk will become ineffective.
Reference:
Philippine Institute for Development Studies. (28, August 2024). New tool offers solutions for comprehensive data on women’s empowerment in agri dev’t. Retrieved May 7, 2025 from https://www.pids.gov.ph/details/news/press-releases/new-tool-offers-solution-for-comprehensive-data-on-women-s-empowerment-in-agri-dev-t
