CARE loves meetings. Lots of meetings. Too many meetings. But maybe we’d feel differently if they saved us time. Women who were part of the Agriculture Extension Support Activity’s (AESA) project had on average 1-2 more hours a day of leisure time. How? By being involved in gender dialogues, and the fact that their husbands then shared the workload at home.
As a sub-grantee to the Dhaka Ahsania Mission and with support from USAID’s Feed the Future program ($3.8 million) CARE Bangladesh has been implementing AESA since 2012. They recently completed a gender impact study, and check out what they found.
What have we accomplished?
- Women have more time: Women in the project were 76% more likely to have free time during their day than the control group was, on average 1-2 hours.
- Men are more engaged: Men in the project are 82% more likely to get involved in household chores, and value women’s efforts at home than they were at baseline (and 71% more likely than the control group).
- Women can make more decisions: Women are 69% more likely to be involved in production decisions and more than twice as likely to participate in expenditure decisions than they were before the gender dialogues.
- Information spills over to broader communities: 90% of women are sharing what they are learning about agriculture and gender to their families and neighbors to ensure that everybody benefits.
- Women have more access to resources: Now, 87% of women have access to credit, which gives them influence in the household that they didn’t have before.
How did we get there?
- Gender dialogues: A classic, but one that works. The project got men and women together to provide safe spaces to talk about gender roles, especially daily time use and the division of household labor.
- Using technology: 67% of farmers are using their phones to call for consultations on agricultural support, giving them quicker, better access to techniques that improve their production.
- Build on groups: 55% of women are regularly participating in cooperatives, and many cite involvement in VSLAs as a path to help them access finance and decision making.
- Connect women to markets: 68% of women in the project are now interacting with market actors in a way they couldn’t before. We haven’t quite cracked the nut, though, and markets are still a very male-dominated space.
Want to learn more?
Read the gender evaluation, or check out the project’s website and stories of change.