The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP) is a three-year collaborative project led by IFPRI and ILRI and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project aims to evaluate eight agricultural development projects to identify their impacts on women's assets and determine which strategies are most effective at reducing gender gaps in asset access and ownership. Through participatory research and capacity building activities, the project seeks to document changes in men's and women's asset levels over time and provide training and recommendations to integrate gender considerations and address asset disparities into future agricultural development efforts.

1. The Gender, Agriculture, and
Assets Project (GAAP)
Overview of the initiative
Presented at the Midterm Workshop, Rajendrapur,
Bangladesh
November, 2011
INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK RESEARCH INSTITUTE

2. Objectives and overview
 Objective: To reduce the gap between men’s and women’s
control and ownership of assets, broadly defined, by
evaluating how and how well agricultural development
programs build women’s assets;
 Three-year project, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation (mid 2010-mid 2013);
 Jointly led by IFPRI and ILRI , including 8 core project
collaborators working in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia;
 Mix of qualitative and quantitative (Q2) expertise and
evaluation methodologies;
 Dreaming big and thinking ahead: Might be the start of a
new paradigm in agricultural development programming!

3. Why assets? Why gender?
 Increasing control/ownership of assets help create pathways out of
poverty more than measures that aim to increase incomes or
consumption alone;
 Households do not pool resources nor share the same preferences 
Who receives resources or controls assets matters;
 Evidence from many countries that increasing resources controlled by
women improves child health and nutrition, agricultural productivity,
income growth;
 Although we know a lot about how to target women and increase
participation with development interventions, methods are still not
widely used in development projects and have not addressed the
gender-gap in assets;
 We define assets broadly: Natural capital, Physical capital, Financial
capital, Human capital, Social capital, Political capital.

4. The big picture: Putting it together

5. Lots of buzz in Kenya: Inception workshop at ILRI, Nov 2010
More photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilri/sets/72157625322903538/

6. Four components of GAAP
1. Capacity building (all grants, especially to facilitate gendered
midcourse improvements);
2. Research (quantitative and qualitative impact assessments);
3. Identifying “good practice” (synthesis and lessons learned);
4. Dissemination and outreach (ongoing, not only at project end).
Left: Farmer shows off MoneyMaker irrigation pump to Enumerator team in Kenya.; Right: Asset transfers in Burkina Faso

7. Capacity building activities
 Develop a conceptual framework for analyzing gender and assets in
agricultural R&D programs;
 Inception workshop in November 2010: training and planning workshop
for potential projects (one evaluation person and one implementer per
project);
 Develop a capacity building strategy and train project members in
gender-asset methodology for selected projects and for the overall
initiative based on the KAP survey;
 Midterm workshop (year 2): progress, research results, midterm
adjustments to projects—NOW!
 Final workshop (end of project): present evaluation results,
effectiveness of different strategies, share lessons from evaluation
results and integrated strategies.

8. Research activities
 Work with the evaluation partners in the selected projects,
design additional gender-sensitive approaches or components to
include in the evaluation plan for each project including data
collection;
 Conduct gender analysis together with evaluation partners, to
include:
• Initial characterization of baseline data;
• Documentation of mid-course adjustments and their impacts;
• Impact analysis by project;
• Synthesis of findings across projects.
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9. Identifying “good practices”
 Identify effective pathways for reaching women and reducing
gender asset disparities, based on ongoing implementation and
cross-project learning;
 Some projects may want to implement midterm adjustments, as
a result of findings. Changes will be documented so we can
learn from them (“Gendered midcourse improvements”);
 Develop alternative strategies for addressing gender disparities
in assets in agricultural development projects, depending on
context (sub-Saharan Africa versus South Asia).
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10. Dissemination and outreach
 Document and widely disseminate methods, results, and lessons
learned about how to build women’s assets and improve livelihoods
through agricultural development projects;
 Thinking “outside the box”: use web-based dissemination options—
set up http://genderassets.wordpress.com;
 Develop training materials and for supporting partners in data
collection, analysis and implementation;
 Prepare scientific papers, project reports, and policy briefs.
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11. Summary of Key points
 Evaluate 8 agricultural development projects:
• Identify the projects’ impacts on women’s assets;
• Clarify which strategies have been successful in reducing
gender gaps in asset access and ownership;
 Participatory process between implementers, evaluation
partners and GAAP team;
 Use existing baseline surveys and new targeted studies
(qualitative and quantitative) to document men’s and women’s
assets and the change in those levels over the life of the project;
 Provide training and technical assistance to program staff in
methods to identify and address gender disparities in assets;
 Contribute to a development toolkit to reduce gender asset
disparities and help to place gender considerations at the center
of agricultural development.
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12. Mind the gap!