As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, trade-offs have emerged between the need to contain the virus and to avoid disastrous economic and food security crises that hurt the world's poor and hungry most. Although no major food shortages have emerged as yet, agricultural and food markets are facing disruptions because of labor shortages created by restrictions on movements of people and shifts in food demand resulting from closures of restaurants and schools as well as from income losses.
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.