WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT IN GHANA'S RURAL COMMUNITIES: A FARMER-CENTERED APPROACH
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Assessing the relationship between empowerment and nutrition along the agriculture nutrition pathway is limited by dissimilar emic and etic views of the construct, limited understanding of its contextual variation, and measurement difficulties. This study explored local meanings and perceptions of empowerment among women and men farmers in rural Ghana. The qualitative study took place within the LinkINg Up project, a quasi-experimental, nutrition-sensitive agriculture intervention (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03869853) in three sub-districts of the Eastern Region. The intervention was implemented through farmer-based organizations (FBO) that were selected using a set of criteria such as female representation and level of member participation. Within the FBO, all women were recruited to participate along with one male adult family member (spouse/partner, older son, father). Non-FBO members (women and their male family member) from the same communities were also enrolled as a comparison group. This manuscript addresses an independent research question on empowerment, not the LinkINg Up intervention outcomes. For the question, participants (53 females and 45 males) were selected purposefully based on FBO membership of the woman (member, non-member). During the first three months of the project, eight focus group discussions (FGD) with women and seven FGD with men were conducted to probe into local understandings of empowerment and women’s empowerment (WE). The FGD were translated to English from the local language and transcripts were coded using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach (open, axial, selective coding) with MAXQDA 2022. Women and men described empowerment in terms of an individual’s capability to improve circumstances by setting and meeting intentional and measurable goals. The construct of empowerment was made up of internal and external components. Internal components were those that were essential to allow one to be empowered, such as self-confidence, while the external components of empowerment were related to personal and community factors that empowered people, for example, asset ownership and social support. Emic understandings of WE were often related to women’s relationships with others and their roles (reproductive, productive, and community) within the studied context. The local descriptions of an empowered woman were categorized as someone who: i) exhibits qualities that are perceived to help one achieve goals, ii) takes actions to achieve goals, and iii) works with others to achieve own goals or common goals. When assessing WE in the study area, it is important to incorporate measures for women’s goal-setting capacity in relation to farming and business activities, and their ability to implement their goals, while taking into account relational aspects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".