FR1.2: Understanding Community Perceptions of Women Empowerment for Agricultural and Rural development

The concept of women empowerment has been widely embraced in development efforts aimed at achieving gender equality outcomes. However, intended outcomes are not always achieved due to a disconnect between how the concept of women empowerment is perceived by target communities and development actors. An understanding of how targeted communities perceive women empowerment helps development actors design context specific women empowerment approaches suited to prevailing social cultural norms and perceptions of men and women. This study therefore aims at understanding perceptions of women empowerment by local communities in rural farming villages of Kiboga district in central Uganda. A qualitative case study design was used to collect data on community perceptions about women empowerment through key informants and sex-disaggregated focus group discussions. The data were coded using Atlas Ti and analyzed to identify themes. We found that men perceived an empowered woman as un-submissive, and a competitor to men's household head position. To women, an empowered woman was perceived as un-submissive, hardworking and taking over culturally assigned men's household responsibilities. As women get empowered, what do men become and at what cost to women? Findings indicate that an empowered woman takes over the responsibilities of an "ideal man" and this adds work burden to women and a backlash from men. In order to counter this, development agencies should target men and women and invest in interventions and approaches that transform local gender norms that dis-empower women. The study is ongoing and further data collection will be completed in August 2022

TH2.1: Understanding femininities: Implications for women's Participation in Agricultural interventions in central Uganda

Research has documented how men's behaviors in patriarchal settings affect women's economic empowerment outcomes, while less attention has been paid to how gender identity constructions around femininities influence these outcomes. We define femininities as gender based roles and expected behaviors of women in a given community and economic empowerment as women's decision-making regarding access and control of productive resources and management of income. This paper presents research on how female and male farmers in rural communities of central Uganda define what it means to be a woman and how those identity constructions influence women's economic empowerment. This qualitative case study is based on focus group discussions conducted with Sasakawa Africa Association intervention farmers (28 women and 25 men) of Kiboga District. Six focus group discussions were conducted, two with men only, women only, and both men and women respectively. Findings reveal co-existence of traditional and progressive femininities, dubbed "unruly" by men and some women. Traditional femininities were depicted as women complying to community values which deter them from financial decision making and owning productive resources. Progressive femininities on the other hand are noncompliant to these community values, and enjoy more economic empowerment. Men valued economically empowered women because they relieve men of financial responsibilities. Incorporating gender transformative approaches in women's economic empowerment interventions could decode traditional femininities and increase women's intrinsic agency within the context of economic empowerment

TH2.1: Empowerment without Transformation? A Scoping Review on Women Empowerment, Masculinities and Social norms in Agricultural Research

There is an increasing focus on re-thinking women's "empowerment" strategic interventions in order to achieve meaningful transformation in gender norms. This move is increasingly characterized by initiatives that deliberately seek to engage women and men, highlighting not only how women's lives in agricultural communities are interwoven with men's lives but also calls for ‘involvement' of men in women's empowerment work to address the underlying social norms, attitudes and behaviours that perpetuate gender inequalities. How have social categories "women", "men" and notions of empowerment and masculinities been conceptualized in agricultural research on women's empowerment? How have these concepts been deployed in agricultural research and with what implications? This paper draws from a literature review. Search terms included "Women's empowerment", "masculinities", "gender norms", "agency" "Power relations", "Rural masculinities" "male involvement in agriculture". Drawing on literature within agri food system, seed systems, nutrition sensitive agriculture in different regions of Africa and Asia, the paper argues that conceptualization of categories women, men, masculinities and femininities and the approaches drawn therefrom (the assumptions we work with about women and men) have potential to transform and/or reproduce unequal gender power relations

TH2.1: Who is a man? Understanding the local normative climate for transformative interventions in rural farming communities of Central Uganda

Local gender normative climate refers to how norms in a community interact with men and women agency- their ability to make strategic life choices. Understanding the normative climate includes unpacking the community's expectations of what it means to be a man "masculinity norms". Such normative factors interact with and constrain opportunities for women's equitable participation in agriculture, yet most women empowerment literature focuses on individual women level factors. This ongoing study aims to determine masculinity norms that affect women's ability to make strategic choices within the Sasakawa Africa's Nutrition sensitive agricultural extension project intervention areas in Kiboga District, Central Uganda. The study utilized an interpretive qualitative case study with data collected from sex disagreggated focus group discussions with intervention beneficiaries. Findings indicate that the community expectation of who a man should be are along family formation and provisioning; dominance in household decision making and leadership; and community level participation. The normative structures also exempted men from participating in domestic chores and negative sanctions were experienced by men that did so. Gender roles espousing notions like "vegetable growing is a woman's domain" dissuaded men's engagement in this activity. Consequently, domestic chores on top of additional activities from vegetables growing under the project present an increased labor burden for women. Inability to make strategic life choices like attending training that would build their capacities in areas important for their development curtails their economic investments. This calls for development agents' deliberate efforts to engage both women and men to reframe norms and new behaviors that will foster gender equality and a harmoniously transformed community

Using graduates as key stakeholders to inform training and policy in health professions: The hidden potential of tracer studies

Background. Tracer studies are alumni surveys that attempt to track  activities of graduates of an educational institution, which enable the contextualisation of these professionals through a dynamic and reliable system to determine their career progression. It also enables the gathering of information to feed back into training institutions and to inform policy bodies on key issues. The purpose of this study was to track career paths of radiography graduates in Uganda, examine their contribution to their profession, and establish their opinions on how to improve training and inform policy.Methods. A cross-sectional descriptive survey of radiography graduates who completed their training between 2001 and 2011 was conducted. Namesof graduates were obtained from university records and contact details were sought from the register of the Uganda Radiographers Association, Facebook, Twitter, and friends. Data were collected using a  self-administered questionnaire distributed electronically to the students. In a few instances, the survey was completed telephonically.Results. A total of 90 questionnaires were sent out; 72 (80%) were returned. The majority of the respondents (95.8%) were employed as radiographers at the time of the survey and were all satisfied with their work. A significant number were employed abroad, while those who  remained in the country worked for private health facilities and only a few worked in government health facilities. Key suggestions were identified to improve training and influence policy.Conclusion. Graduate radiographers were generally satisfied with their current work. Many trained radiographers, however, are leaving the country,thereby creating a skills shortage in the government healthcare system

Utilisation of obstetric sonography at a peri-urban health centre in Uganda

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Variable ecological conditions promote male helping by changing banded mongoose group composition.

PublishedArticle© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Ecological conditions are expected to have an important influence on individuals’ investment in cooperative care. However, the nature of their effects is unclear: both favorable and unfavorable conditions have been found to promote helping behavior. Recent studies provide a possible explanation for these conflicting results by suggesting that increased ecological variability, rather than changes in mean conditions, promote cooperative care. However, no study has tested whether increased ecological variability promotes individual- level helping behavior or the mechanisms involved. We test this hypothesis in a long-term study population of the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose, Mungos mungo, using 14 years of behavioral and meteorological data to explore how the mean and variability of ecological conditions influence individual behavior, body condition, and survival. Female body condition was more sensitive to changes in rainfall leading to poorer female survival and pronounced male-biased group compositions after periods of high rainfall variability. After such periods, older males invested more in helping behavior, potentially because they had fewer mating opportunities. These results provide the first empirical evidence for increased individual helping effort in more variable ecological conditions and suggest this arises because of individual differences in the effect of ecological conditions on body condition and survival, and the knock-on effect on social group composition. Individual differences in sensitivity to environmental variability, and the impacts this has on the internal structure and composition of animal groups, can exert a strong influence on the evolution and maintenance of social behaviors, such as cooperative care.Natural Environment Research CouncilEuropean Research Council Starting Grant (SOCODEV

The social formation of fitness: lifetime consequences of prenatal nutrition and postnatal care in a wild mammal population

Research in medicine and evolutionary biology suggests that the sequencing of parental investment has a crucial impact on offspring life history and health. Here, we take advantage of the synchronous birth system of wild banded mongooses to test experimentally the lifetime consequences to offspring of receiving extra investment prenatally versus postnatally. We provided extra food to half of the breeding females in each group during pregnancy, leaving the other half as matched controls. This manipulation resulted in two categories of experimental offspring in synchronously born litters: (i) ‘prenatal boost’ offspring whose mothers had been fed during pregnancy, and (ii) ‘postnatal boost’ offspring whose mothers were not fed during pregnancy but who received extra alloparental care in the postnatal period. Prenatal boost offspring lived substantially longer as adults, but postnatal boost offspring had higher lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and higher glucocorticoid levels across the lifespan. Both types of experimental offspring had higher LRS than offspring from unmanipulated litters. We found no difference between the two experimental categories of offspring in adult weight, age at first reproduction, oxidative stress or telomere lengths. These findings are rare experimental evidence that prenatal and postnatal investments have distinct effects in moulding individual life history and fitness in wild mammals.Peer reviewe