Agrifood systems are essential to women’s livelihoods globally, yet their contributions often remain underrecognized. Women are disproportionately concentrated in informal, low-skilled, and labor-intensive roles and face limited access to resources and exclusion from key decision-making processes. To address these gaps, new tools have emerged to better assess women’s empowerment. Building on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), IFPRI, in collaboration with Emory University, Oxford University, and the World Bank, developed the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS). This streamlined metric can be incorporated into large-scale surveys and measures empowerment across agricultural and non-agricultural livelihoods.
Women in low- and middle-income countries also face challenges related to poor diet diversity and insufficient micronutrient intake. In response, FAO introduced the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) in 2015, a simple indicator that identifies populations at risk of malnutrition. Similar to WEMNS, MDD-W can be integrated into national survey systems and has been applied in over 85 countries.
The 50×2030 Initiative to Close the Agricultural Data Gap—implemented by FAO and the World Bank—supports 50 countries in producing high-quality agricultural data to inform national policies and track global and regional development indicators. Through this initiative, WEMNS and MDD-W have recently been incorporated into agricultural surveys in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the United Republic of Tanzania, enabling measurement of women’s empowerment and nutrition status for policy planning.
