Agnes Quisumbing
Biographic Data
| ID | 168505 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Agnes Quisumbing |
| GIVEN NAMES | Agnes |
| FAMILY NAME | Quisumbing |
| SIGNATURE | QUISUMBING A |
| AFFILIATIONS | International Food Policy Research Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5429-1857 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1193 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
How can anticipatory action programming support women? Application of the reach-benefit-empower-transform framework in Nepal and Nigeria
Understanding modifiable caregiver factors contributing to child development among young children in rural Malawi
This study examined modifiable caregiver factors influencing child development in Malawi using baseline data from 1,021 mothers and their children <2 years of age participating in a cluster-randomized controlled trial implemented in rural Malawi (2022-2025). We fit an evidence-based theoretical model using structural equation modelling examining four caregiver factors: (1) diet diversity (sum of food groups consumed in the past 24 h), (2) empower…
Enhancing agency and empowerment in agricultural development projects
Development interventions increasingly include women's empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but evaluating their impact has been stymied by the lack of measures that are comparable across interventions. This paper synthesizes the findings of 11 mixed-methods impact evaluations of agricultural development projects from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that were part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2…
Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India
Women's self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition interve…
Diet quality and micronutrient intakes in nutritional value chains
Scale and Sustainability
Microfinance groups are a prominent source of small-scale rural credit in many developing countries. In India, evidence of the impact of the now ubiquitous women-only savings and credit self-help groups (SHGs) on household consumption and asset accumulation is inconclusive and based on small-scale interventions. Further, little is known about the sustainability of impacts at scale. We use panel data on close to 2500 households from five states in…
Comparing delivery channels to promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture
We use a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh to compare two models of delivering nutrition content jointly to husbands and wives: deploying female nutrition workers versus mostly male agriculture extension workers. Both approaches increased nutrition knowledge of men and women, household and individual diet quality, and women's empowerment. Intervention effects on agriculture and nutrition knowledge, agricultural production diversity,…
Covid-19, nutrition, and gender
The impact of climate change on children's nutritional status in coastal Bangladesh
Structural Transformation and Gendered Transitions to Adulthood among Rural Youth
Using frameworks on gendered transitions to adulthood, we analyse nationally-representative, sex-disaggregated data from 36 countries to examine how structural transformation (share of GDP from non-agriculture) and rural transformation (agricultural value added per worker) are associated with landownership, labour force participation, and sector of employment for rural young women and men. Transformation has different implications for young men’s…
Designing for empowerment impact in agricultural development projects
The importance of women's roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women's empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by the Government of Bangladesh. The project's treatment arms included agricultural training, nutrition …
Women’s empowerment and gender equality in South Asian agriculture
This introduction to a special section describes how a recently developed measure, the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) can be used to assess empowerment impacts of agricultural development interventions in India and Bangladesh as well as broader changes in rural labor markets. The special section comprises three papers. The first examines the impact of membership in self-help groups in five states in rural India …
Nutrition‐sensitive agriculture programme impacts on time use and associations with nutrition outcomes
Success of nutrition-sensitive agriculture programmes targeted to women may be influenced by increased demands on women's and other household members' time and by time-related trade-offs to accommodate programme participation. However, evidence of how such programmes impact time use and whether changes in time-related demands negatively influence maternal or child health and nutrition outcomes is limited. This paper examines the impact of Helen K…
Measuring Time Use in Developing Country Agriculture
This paper discusses the challenges associated with implementing time-use surveys among agricultural households in developing countries and offers advice on best practices for two common measurement methods: stylized questions and time diaries. Using data from Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) surveys in Bangladesh and Uganda, it finds that stylized questions do not always produce shorter interviews compared to time diaries, and rec…
Empowerment in agricultural value chains
Women's participation and empowerment in value chains are goals of many development organizations, but there has been limited systematic, rigorous research to track these goals between and within value chains (VCs). We adapt the survey-based project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to measure women's and men's empowerment in the abaca, coconut, seaweed, and swine VCs in the Philippines and to investigate the correlates of…
Bargaining power, decision making, and biofortification
We examine the role of gender dimensions of intrahousehold bargaining power and decision making in the adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato (OSP), a biofortified crop being promoted to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A in Uganda. We use patterns of ownership and control of land and other assets by married men and women to create gender-disaggregated indicators of bargaining power, allowing for joint and sole ownership and control of …
Do tradeoffs among dimensions of women’s empowerment and nutrition outcomes exist? Evidence from six countries in Africa and Asia
Although women's empowerment and gender equality are often linked with better maternal and child nutrition outcomes, recent systematic reviews find inconclusive evidence. This paper applies a comparable methodology to data on the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), an internationally-validated measure based on interviews of women and men within the same household, from six countries in Africa and Asia to identify which dimensions of …
Women's land rights as a pathway to poverty reduction
This paper reviews the literature on women’s land rights (WLR) and poverty reduction. It uses the Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project (GAAP) conceptual framework to identify pathways by which WLR could reduce poverty and increase wellbeing of women and their households in rural areas. It uses a systematic review search methodology to identify papers for inclusion, but adopts a more synthetic approach to assess the level of agreement and the am…
Development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-Weai)
With growing commitment to women's empowerment by agricultural development agencies, sound methods and indicators to measure women's empowerment are needed to learn which types of projects or project-implementation strategies do and do not work to empower women. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has been widely used, requires adaptation to meet the need for monitoring projects and assessing their impacts. In this paper, t…
Randomized controlled trials of multi-sectoral programs
Development is a multi-faceted process; achieving development goals thus requires a multi-sectoral approach. For over two decades, our research group of economists and nutritionists has designed and implemented randomized trials to assess the effectiveness of multisectoral programs in improving nutrition, food security, and other measures of well-being, largely at the request of developing country governments, development partners, and non-govern…
Nutrition-sensitive agriculture
A growing number of governments, donor agencies, and development organizations are committed to supporting nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) to achieve their development goals. While consensus exists on pathways through which agriculture may influence nutrition-related outcomes, empirical evidence on agriculture's contribution to nutrition and how it can be enhanced is still weak. This paper reviews recent empirical evidence (since 2014), inc…
Women in agriculture
Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG) on gender equality and women's rights and at least 11 of the 17 SDGs require indicators related to gender dynamics. Despite the need for reliable indicators, stylized facts on women, agriculture, and the environment persist. This paper analyzes four gender myths: 1) 70% of the world's poor are women; 2) Women produce 60 to 80% of the world's food; 3) Women own 1% of the world's land; and 4) Women are better st…
Youth Migration and Labour Constraints in African Agrarian Households
Using panel data from Ethiopia and Malawi, we investigate how youth migration affects household labour, hired labour demand, and income, and whether these effects vary by migrant sex and destination. Labour shortages arise from the migration of a head’s child. However, the migration of the head’s sons produces a greater burden, particularly on female heads/spouses (in Ethiopia) and brothers (in Malawi). Gains from migration in the form of increas…
Women’s empowerment in agriculture and dietary quality across the life course
Using nationally-representative survey data from rural Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women's empowerment in agriculture and indicators of individual dietary quality. Our findings suggest that women's empowerment is associated with better dietary quality of individuals within the household, but the strength of this association varies across the life course. Women's empowerment is correlated with more diverse diets of children und…
Social networks, mobility, and political participation
Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our understanding of ways in which SHGs improve awareness and use of public services is limited. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper first examines how SHG membershi…
The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index
The Impact of Improving Nutrition During Early Childhood on Education among Guatemalan Adults
Using a longitudinal survey from rural Guatemala, we examine the effect of an early childhood nutritional intervention on adult educational outcomes. An intent-to-treat model yields substantial effects of an experimental intervention that provided highly nutritious food supplements to children, a quarter century after it ended: increases of 1.2 grades completed for women and one quarter SD on standardised reading comprehension and non-verbal cogn…
The gender implications of large-scale land deals
This article introduces a discussion of gender dimensions into the growing debate on large-scale land deals. It addresses the current information gap on the differential gender effects of large-scale land deals through (1) an overview of the phases of large-scale land deals and discussion of related effects on rural men and women based on new literature on large-scale land deals and past literature on the gender effects of commercialization and c…
Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture
Using nationally representative survey data from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture and two measures of household food security: per adult equivalent calorie availability and dietary diversity. We use the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index to assess the extent of women’s empowerment in agriculture and instrumental variables techniques to correct for the potential endogeneity of empowerment. We…
Promising Approaches to Address the Needs of Poor Female Farmers
What dimensions of women’s empowerment in agriculture matter for nutrition in Ghana
Examines empowerment–nutrition links using a new survey-based empowerment measure. • Empowerment is more strongly associated with diet quality than nutrition status. • Credit decisionmaking is associated with better outcomes for both women and girls. • Different domains of empowerment may have different impacts on nutrition. This paper investigates linkages between women’s empowerment in agriculture and the nutritional status of women and childre…
Development of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-Weai)
With growing commitment to women's empowerment by agricultural development agencies, sound methods and indicators to measure women's empowerment are needed to learn which types of projects or project-implementation strategies do and do not work to empower women. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which has been widely used, requires adaptation to meet the need for monitoring projects and assessing their impacts. In this paper, t…
Gender, property rights, and natural resources
Gender, Assets, and Agricultural Development
Ownership of assets is important for poverty reduction, and women's control of assets is associated with positive development outcomes at the household and individual levels. This research was undertaken to provide guidance for agricultural development programs on how to incorporate gender and assets in the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions. This paper synthesizes the findings of eight mixed-method evaluations of the impacts…
Are women overrepresented among the poor? An analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries
Assets at marriage in rural Ethiopia
Male-female differences in agricultural productivity
Gender, assets, and market-oriented agriculture
Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. In many contexts, ownership of assets is strongly gendered, reflecting existing gender norms and limiting women’s ability to invest in more profitable livelihood strategies such as market-oriented agriculture. Yet the intersection between women’s asset endowments and t…
Food Aid and Child Nutrition in Rural Ethiopia
Intergenerational transfers in Philippine rice villages
Social networks, mobility, and political participation
Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our understanding of ways in which SHGs improve awareness and use of public services is limited. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper first examines how SHG membershi…
Women's Land Rights in the Transition to Individualized Ownership
Empowerment in agricultural value chains
Women's participation and empowerment in value chains are goals of many development organizations, but there has been limited systematic, rigorous research to track these goals between and within value chains (VCs). We adapt the survey-based project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to measure women's and men's empowerment in the abaca, coconut, seaweed, and swine VCs in the Philippines and to investigate the correlates of…
Flypaper effects” in transfers targeted to women
Many development interventions target transfers to women. However, little evidence directly explores the “flypaper effects” of whether women retain control over these transfers once within the household and how reallocation of the transfers affects women's empowerment. We study these dynamics in the context of BRAC's randomized CFPR-TUP program in Bangladesh, which provides livestock and training to rural women in “ultra poor” households. Our ana…
Consumption Insurance and Vulnerability to Poverty
Do tradeoffs among dimensions of women’s empowerment and nutrition outcomes exist? Evidence from six countries in Africa and Asia
Although women's empowerment and gender equality are often linked with better maternal and child nutrition outcomes, recent systematic reviews find inconclusive evidence. This paper applies a comparable methodology to data on the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), an internationally-validated measure based on interviews of women and men within the same household, from six countries in Africa and Asia to identify which dimensions of …
Land Inheritance and Schooling in Matrilineal Societies
Beyond “Death Do Us Part”
Marriage, Bequest, and Assortative Matching in Rural Ethiopia
This article examines the determinants of human and physical capital at marriage. Using detailed data from rural Ethiopia, we find that assets brought to marriage are distributed in a highly unequal manner. For first unions, assets brought to marriage are positively associated with parents’ wealth, indicating that a bequest motive affects assets at marriage. Parental wealth affects the inheritance of neither groom nor bride. Sibling competition f…
Women’s empowerment and gender equality in South Asian agriculture
This introduction to a special section describes how a recently developed measure, the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) can be used to assess empowerment impacts of agricultural development interventions in India and Bangladesh as well as broader changes in rural labor markets. The special section comprises three papers. The first examines the impact of membership in self-help groups in five states in rural India …
Intergenerational transfers in Philippine rice villages
Male-female differences in agricultural productivity
Gender, property rights, and natural resources
Gender and property rights
Gender Issues for Food Security in Developing Countries
Women in developing countries play a crucial role in meeting the food and nutrition needs of their families through the “three pillars” of food security—food production, economic access to food, and nutrition security. Empirical evidence shows that income increases controlled by women have a greater impact on household food security, child health and schooling than those controlled by men. Despite women's importance, they are constrained by lower…
Gender Differences in Land Inheritance, Schooling and Lifetime Income
"This article examines the difference in lifetime incomes arising from parental preferences in the allocation of land inheritance and investments in schooling between sons and daughters in the rural Philippines. Sons are preferred with respect to land inheritance, receiving 0.15 additional hectares of land, while daughters are treated more favourably in schooling investments, receiving 1.5 more years of schooling. However, differences in both cur…
Land Inheritance and Schooling in Matrilineal Societies
Are women overrepresented among the poor? An analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries
Women's Land Rights in the Transition to Individualized Ownership
Control and Ownership of Assets Within Rural Ethiopian Households
This article investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife. Theory predicts that bargaining power within marriage depends on the division of assets upon divorce and on control over assets during marriage. Using detailed household data from rural Ethiopia, we show that assets brought to marriage, ownership of assets, control within marriage, and disposition upon death or divorce are only part…
Resources at Marriage and Intrahousehold Allocation
We test the unitary versus collective model of the household using specially designed data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and South Africa. Human capital and individual assets at the time of marriage are used as proxy measures for bargaining power. In all four countries, we reject the unitary model as a description of household behaviour, but fail to reject the hypothesis that households are Pareto‐efficient. In Bangladesh and South Africa…
Food Aid and Child Nutrition in Rural Ethiopia
Consumption Insurance and Vulnerability to Poverty
Assets at marriage in rural Ethiopia
Mothers' Work and Child Care
This study investigates the determinants of labor force participation and child care utilization of mothers in the slums of Guatemala City. Data come from a survey in 1999 of 1,300 randomly selected mothers with preschool children, out of whom 37% worked for pay in the last 30 days. Results show that education, life cycle, and household demographic factors affect work and child care decisions. Higher household wealth reduces the mother’s chances …
Marriage, Bequest, and Assortative Matching in Rural Ethiopia
This article examines the determinants of human and physical capital at marriage. Using detailed data from rural Ethiopia, we find that assets brought to marriage are distributed in a highly unequal manner. For first unions, assets brought to marriage are positively associated with parents’ wealth, indicating that a bequest motive affects assets at marriage. Parental wealth affects the inheritance of neither groom nor bride. Sibling competition f…
Michael Kevane. Women and Development in Africa
Maquiladoras and market mamas
This paper analyses work, childcare, and earnings of mothers in the slums of Guatemala City and Accra. Similar factors affect decisions to work and to use formal daycare, but the importance of childcare varies with the role of the formal labour sector. In Guatemala, where formal sector work is important, higher prices for informal care increase formal daycare use. However, daycare prices and proximity to daycare centers do not significantly affec…
The Impact of Prime Age Adult Mortality on Child Survival and Growth in Rural Ethiopia
Promising Approaches to Address the Needs of Poor Female Farmers
The Impact of Improving Nutrition During Early Childhood on Education among Guatemalan Adults
Using a longitudinal survey from rural Guatemala, we examine the effect of an early childhood nutritional intervention on adult educational outcomes. An intent-to-treat model yields substantial effects of an experimental intervention that provided highly nutritious food supplements to children, a quarter century after it ended: increases of 1.2 grades completed for women and one quarter SD on standardised reading comprehension and non-verbal cogn…
Moving Forward, Looking Back
This paper investigates the impact of migration and remittances on asset holdings, consumption expenditures, and credit constraint status of households in origin communities, using a unique longitudinal data set from Bukidnon, Philippines. Taking into account the endogeneity of the number of migrants and remittances received, a larger number of migrant children reduces the values of nonland assets and total expenditures per adult equivalent. Howe…
Understanding the Complexities Surrounding Gender Differences in Agricultural Productivity in Nigeria and Uganda
We investigate gender differences in agricultural productivity in Nigeria and Uganda. Results indicate persistent lower productivity on female-owned plots and among female-headed households, accounting for a range of socio-economic variables, agricultural inputs and crop choices using multivariate tobit models. Results are robust to inclusion of household-level unobservables and alternative specifications that account for decisions to plant crops…
How Resilient are Labour Markets to Natural Disasters? The Case of the 1998 Bangladesh Flood
Natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation. The resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk. We evaluate how the 1998 ‘flood of the century’ affected wages in Bangladesh. We find short-term declines in agricultural and non-agricultural wages. Agricultural workers who moved towards non-agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short-t…
The effect of prime age adult mortality on household composition and consumption in rural Ethiopia
Economics (59 works) · Economic growth (42 works) · Geography (40 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (40 works) · Agriculture (36 works) · Political science (33 works) · Business (27 works) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (22 works) · Demographic economics (22 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (20 works)