From data to impact: How gender insights help farmers prosper

In agriculture, data is more than just numbers: it is a window into farmers’ lives, challenges, and opportunities. Unfortunately, the numbers on gender often tell a story of inequity: across Africa, women make up nearly half of the agricultural workforce, but earn far less than men and own only a fraction of the land they cultivate.

From the beginning, One Acre Fund has reached women farmers, often more than men. While this was not always intentional, the structure of our program naturally supported farmers, especially women, in overcoming key barriers such as limited access to farm suppliers and knowledge. As a result, farmers who are often excluded or disadvantaged, were eager to participate and benefit.

As our organization has scaled, we recognized the need to adopt a more deliberate approach to understanding women’s unique needs and challenges, thereby enhancing our reach and impact. We believe that closing this gap starts with understanding it. Collecting and analyzing data by gender helps us identify where disparities exist, uncover insights into the different experiences of farmers, test solutions, and shape programs that deliver fairer outcomes for all. 

How we collect gender data

At One Acre Fund, our initiatives and overall gender vision are driven by robust gender data collected through a gender-responsive Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) system. Our MEL system is tracking gender-disaggregated impact and shifts in women’s empowerment, while also gathering insights from farmers about their needs, challenges, and the cultural and social norms that shape their experiences.

Since 2024, our MEL system has been developing particularly along two tracks:

Track 1: Gender-disaggregated productivity & income

We are continuously improving how we disaggregate our impact by gender to better identify and track differences in yield and income. Since agriculture is a household-level activity, assigning gender to a household is not straightforward, and we are still exploring the most accurate ways to do so. 

One approach we are currently testing is identifying the gender of the person who makes key decisions related to agriculture and other household matters. Rather than simply recording who signs when enrolling with us for farm supplies or who answers our surveys, we have introduced a decision-making module that asks questions such as: Who decides what to plant? Who controls how farming income is spent? This approach helps us better understand household decision-making dynamics and allows us to categorize households as having agriculture decision-making led by women, men, or jointly; thereby uncovering the power dynamics that shape farming and household outcomes.

After successfully piloting this decision-making module in Burundi and Rwanda in 2024, we rolled it out across all our countries in 2025. This allows us to disaggregate data on program participation, yields, incomes, and adoption of agricultural practices by gender, enabling us to:

• Identify gender-specific productivity barriers by crop and household type
• Design onboarding strategies to boost women’s participation across the agricultural sector
• Develop interventions to improve women’s yields and incomes where gaps are identified.

Track 2: Women’s empowerment & agency

Understanding women’s productivity is important, but so is understanding their agency to make and act on their own choices, as this helps us design initiatives to promote shared household decision-making, thereby strengthening overall household resilience. 

To do so, we rolled out the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) in Rwanda, Kenya, and Burundi between 2022 to 2025 to measure differences in decision-making power, control over assets, and agency between men and women, giving us deeper insights into household power dynamics.

To make empowerment tracking part of our core MEL system, we are also collecting data annually on: 

• Women’s role in key farming and household decisions
• Women’s ownership of land, either solely or jointly

Using insights to drive change

Our gender-responsive MEL system is not just about collecting data; it also promotes using that data to drive real change. Across our programs, our initial data-driven insights are already shaping more equitable outcomes:

• In Burundi, we have adapted our training mobilization and delivery to encourage greater women’s attendance and participation, closing gaps where women often did most of the farming but attended fewer trainings.
• We have launched radio campaigns in Rwanda to encourage shared household decision-making, highlighting the importance of supportive men, and promoting healthy family communication.
• We have also piloted a “planting partners” program in Malawi where we gave vouchers to women farmers to hire casual labor during pregnancy and postpartum to ease their labor and time constraints.

Our gender data has also informed the design of an organization-wide gender strategy that unites our work with both farmers and staff. The strategy is ensuring that women’s voices and experiences shape our programs and decisions at every level. We also recognize that lasting change happens when people work together, so we are actively involving men as allies and change agents.

Looking ahead

Though we have made significant progress, we believe there is still more to do. In the coming months, we will further strengthen our MEL systems to more accurately disaggregate our impact by gender and deepen our research to embed gender considerations into everyday program management. This will help us eventually move from pilot insights to more consistent, evidence-informed improvements across our work and advocate and support better policies and more equitable outcomes for the farmers we serve.

Our ambition is simple yet far-reaching: to ensure that women farmers benefit equitably from agricultural programs. By doing so, we support households to achieve food security, resilience, and economic stability. When this vision is realized, women will have more time to attend training, access farm tools and credit, and have fair control over their income. 

Because when women farmers thrive, entire communities grow!