Many development agencies are designing and implementing socially-inclusive agricultural interventions at the level of the value chain—covering multiple stages and different types of actors. Monitoring and evaluating the success of these value chain interventions require tools that can track the empowerment of and identify the constraints facing the women and men who participate across multiple stages of the value chain. Whereas the WEAI and A-WEAI are designed to assess the empowerment status of women in farm households, the WEAI for Value Chains (WEAI4VC) is currently being developed to measure empowerment across the value chain, based on pilot studies in Bangladesh and the Philippines.

The Bangladesh pilot assessed empowerment of men and women as different types of value chain actors – (1) producers, (2) entrepreneurs, and (3) wage workers – in the USAID-supported Feed the Future Zone of Influence in the southwestern region of Bangladesh. The Philippines pilot looked at empowerment of men and women working in production, processing, trading, and marketing in abaca, coconut, seaweed, and swine value chains.