Invisible Market: Energy and Agricultural Technologies for Women's Economic Advancement

This research explores what it takes for technology initiatives, specifically in the energy and agricultural sectors, to reach and economically benefit women in developing countries through market-based strategies that have the potential for achieving scale and financial sustainability. It builds on ICRW's landmark paper, Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology Can Advance Women Economically, which made the case for how technologies can create pathways for strengthening women's economic opportunities. Through a field-level investigation and interviews with experts, the authors examine how women's use of technology and their involvement in the development and distribution of a technology can not only advance women economically, but also can benefit enterprise-based technology initiatives by expanding their markets and helping them generate greater financial returns

Estimating the Number and Economic Contribution of Home-based Garment Producers in Ahmedabad, India

Home-based producers are some of the most invisible workers in the unorganised sector. In many industries, including garment making, they comprise a sizeable proportion of the workforce. Because these producers work within the home, often on activities closely related to household production for consumption, they are easily missed in labour force estimates. Added to this problem is the fact that many home-based producers are women and women have traditionally been an under-counted group within labour force statistics. The paper aims to make visible the number and contribution of male and female home-based garment producers in Ahmedabad, illustrating any deficiencies in official statistics. It also highlights the aggregate contribution made as well as differences by gender and recommends ways to improve counts of home-based producers and strategies to increase the contribution of female home-based garment producers in Ahmedabad.Textile IndustryHome-based WorkersGarment Industry

Informal fish retailing in rural Egypt: Opportunities to enhance income and work conditions for women and men

Poor rural consumers benefit from Egypt’s aquaculture sector through access to small and medium-sized farmed tilapia sold by informal fish retailers, many of whom are women. In fact, informal fish retail is the main, if not only, segment of the farmed fish value chain where women are found. This report aims to inform current and future strategies to improve conditions in informal fish retail by understanding in more depth the similarities and differences in employment quality and outcomes across different fish retailers. It is particularly focused on identifying whether and how gender inequality influences different dimensions of the work, and whether women and men have similar outcomes and employment conditions. This knowledge will help to design interventions to overcome gender-based constraints, as well as approaches that address shared obstacles and include both women and men in gender-responsive ways to ensure that all of those involved in the sector benefit

Rotochemical Heating of Neutron Stars: Rigorous Formalism with Electrostatic Potential Perturbations

The electrostatic potential that keeps approximate charge neutrality in neutron star matter is self-consistently introduced into the formalism for rotochemical heating presented in a previous paper by Fernandez and Reisenegger. Although the new formalism is more rigorous, we show that its observable consequences are indistinguishable from those of the previous one, leaving the conclusions of the previous paper unchanged.Comment: 14 pages, including 4 eps figures. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Gender-transformative approaches to address inequalities in food, nutrition and economic outcomes in aquatic agricultural systems

Aquatic Agricultural Systems (AAS) uses gender-transformative approaches to help achieve the goal of enhancing development outcomes of resource-poor women and men and their families. This paper details the approaches utilized by the program and their implementation in its five learning hubs (Solomon Islands, Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Zambia), located in areas where dependence on aquatic agricultural systems is high.Cultivate Africa’s Future Fund (CULTIAF

Adding gender transformation into value chain analysis

Peer Revie

The role of social resources in securing life and livelihood in rural Afghanistan

This paper examines how rural Afghan households in five villages located in Badakhshan and Kandahar provinces have negotiated within contexts of weak formal institutions and localized power to achieve physical and economic security. The paper uses household case studies to assess how the concepts of informal security regimes and dependent security aid understanding of the means through which rural households in Afghanistan seek security. It particularly examines how different households’ are integrated into social relationships, the variable quality and usefulness of these relationships, and under what conditions they might facilitate autonomous versus dependent security. In doing so the paper explores the importance of context, linking the details of household experiences to their village and provincial locations. It provides an understanding of opportunities for and constraints to rural transformation in Afghanistan based on the social hierarchies and relations present, illustrating the complexities with which interventions aimed at improving human security and reducing poverty must engage, interventions which to date have focused more on filling gaps in access to human and material resources than on addressing the root causes of poverty

Qualitative, comparative and collaborative research at large scale:The GENNOVATE Field Methodology

We present a field-tested “medium-n” qualitative comparative methodology, which enhances understanding of the strong and fluid influence of gender norms on processes of local agricultural innovation in the Global South. The GENNOVATE approach (“Enabling Gender Equality in Agricultural and Environmental Innovation”) weaves together three broad methodological challenges—context, comparison, and collaboration—and highlights how addressing the social context of innovation contributes to applied research. We discuss GENNOVATE’s analytic approach, sampling framework, data collection, and analysis procedures, and reflect critically on the research strategies adopted to document and learn from the perspectives and experiences of over 7,000 women and men in 137 villages across 26 low- and middle-income countries