Does time allocation matter for the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture? Insights of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index WEAI

evaluation of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) For the past three years, Feed the Future Initiative has invested many resources in the creation and implementation of the Women’s Empowerment in Agricultural Index (WEAI), in hopes to have an economic effective policy tool. This index is claimed to be a holistic tool to measure Women’s Empowerment in the developing countries using a multidimensional approach, where the measurement of time allocation is the innovative component of the index. Although the WEAI has been used in many developing countries to create policies to transform the agricultural sector to an inclusive and equitable one, there have been few attempts to formally evaluate the performance of the index using an economic approach. There are two primary aims of this paper: First is to assess the association between the indicators of the WEAI and the latent variable Women’s Empowerment using data from Ghana and Bangladesh using the Using the Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) modeling approach. The second is to provide insights of how to correct the overestimation/underestimations of the dimensions that are included in the calculation of the WEAI.