Women’s economic empowerment through gender-responsive agricultural extension programming in rural communities

Introduction

Across rural Africa, women carry the heaviest agricultural workload while exercising the least control over the resulting income and assets [1] . This imbalance has been documented for decades, but extension services have been slow to address it-most advisory programs continue to target household heads, who are predominantly male, leaving women farmers underserved [2,3] . Rwanda has been a notable exception in policy intent. After the 1994 genocide, the government adopted progressive gender legislation and set explicit targets for women's participation in agricultural programs [4] . Yet at the field level, extension delivery often remains gender-blind in practice. Gender-responsive extension goes beyond simply including women in farmer groups. It involves adapting meeting times, training content, leadership structures, and market linkages to address the specific constraints women facelimited mobility, lower literacy, restricted asset ownership, and unequal household decision-making power [5,6] . Evaluations from Ethiopia and Bangladesh have shown that gender-targeted advisory programs can improve women's crop income and decision-making authority within one to two seasons [7,8] . This research assessed whether a gender-responsive extension program in northwestern Rwanda improved women's economic empowerment across six measurable dimensions over an 18-month period. The objectives were: a) To compare empowerment trajectories between extension-supported and control groups, b) To identify which empowerment dimensions responded most and least to the intervention, and c) To examine district-level variation in outcomes [9] .

Theoretical framework

The research drew on Kabeer's empowerment framework, which defines empowerment as the process of expanding women's ability to make strategic life choices across three interrelated dimensions: resources (access to material, human, and social resources), agency (decision-making processes), and achievements (well-being outcomes) [10] . Extension programming was positioned as the resource input that builds women's agency through skills, information, and social networks, ultimately producing measurable achievement gains. The framework was supplemented by Alkire's Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index methodology, which informed the multidimensional measurement approach used in this research [11] .

Instrument development

The Women's Economic Empowerment Index (WEEI) was constructed from 24 items across six dimensions: income control (4 items), asset ownership (4 items), market access (4 items), decision making (4 items), credit access (4 items), and group leadership (4 items). All items used a 5-point www.extensionjournal.com Likert scale. Cronbach's alpha for the full scale was 0.86. Content validity was assessed by five gender and agriculture specialists at the University of Rwanda. A pilot with 20 women in Musanze District led to rewording of two creditrelated items. The instrument was administered in Kinyarwanda [12] .

Material and methods

Material

A quasi-experimental longitudinal design was employed, tracking 212 women farmers across four districts in northwestern Rwanda (Musanze, Nyabihu, Rubavu, and Burera) from January 2021 to July 2022. The extensionsupported group (n = 118) received gender-responsive advisory through district-level women's farmer organizations affiliated with the Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board. The control group (n = 94) received standard extension services. The WEEI was administered at baseline and at 6, 12, and 18 months. Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Rwanda Institutional Review Board (Protocol UR-CAVM/2020-041, dated November 12, 2020) [13] .

Methods

Repeated-measures ANOVA compared WEEI trajectories between the two groups over the four measurement points. Independent t-tests compared dimension-specific scores at the 18-month endpoint. Effect sizes were calculated using Cohen's d. District-level comparisons used one-way ANOVA. Attrition was minimal (4.1%), and intention-totreat analysis was applied. All analyses used SPSS version 26 [14] . Decision making scored highest across all districts, while credit access was consistently the weakest dimension, particularly in Burera where formal lending infrastructure is sparse. The framework links four extension components-financial literacy, market linkage, leadership training, and asset building-through women's farmer groups and individual capacity to empowerment and household welfare outcomes.

Results

Comprehensive interpretation

Gender-responsive extension produced large and consistent empowerment gains across all six dimensions. The doseresponse pattern over time and the group divergence at each measurement point indicate genuine program effects rather than selection artifacts.

Discussion

The large effect sizes for decision making (d = 1.31) and income control (d = 1.24) align with evaluations of similar programs in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, where women's participation in agricultural decision making was the first dimension to respond to targeted extension [7,8] . These dimensions may shift fastest because they require changes in behavior and social norms rather than structural investments. Credit access, by contrast, depends on the availability of financial institutions, collateral requirements, and lending policies that extension alone cannot change [15,16] . The district-level variation reflects known differences in extension staffing density and proximity to market centers. Musanze and Rubavu both host district-level agricultural resource centers and have better road connectivity, which facilitates group meetings and market trips [17] . Burera's lower scores suggest that infrastructure deficits can limit the reach of even well-designed programs. Future programming should consider pairing gender-responsive extension with targeted credit facilitation and transport support in more remote districts to ensure that empowerment gains are not capped by structural constraints [18,19] .

Conclusion

This research demonstrates that gender-responsive agricultural extension programming can produce substantial gains in women's economic empowerment over an 18www.extensionjournal.com month period. The extension-supported group achieved a 71.5% increase in overall empowerment scores compared to 15.6% in the control group. Decision making and income control responded fastest, while credit access remained the most resistant dimension. For extension agencies in Rwanda and comparable East African contexts, the practical implication is clear: embedding gender-responsive modules into routine advisory delivery produces measurable results. However, empowerment gains will be uneven across districts unless structural barriers-particularly credit access and transportare addressed in parallel. Scaling this approach requires both trained extension agents and the institutional infrastructure to support women's market participation beyond the farm gate [20] .

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgements Funding sourcesThis research was supported by an internal research allocation from the University of Rwanda. No commercial funding was received.

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