GIL prize for agricultural informatics

We are happy to share that Alexandra P.C. Krause won the GIL-Prize 2023, the “Förderpreis Agrarinformatik,” for her master’s thesis called “Factors influencing rural farm women’s empowerment in agricultural development.” Many thanks from Alexandra to her two supervisors, Dr. Cory Whitney and Prof. Dr. Eike Luedeling, and the incredible Horti Bonn team. Dr. Katie Tavenner shall be thanked since she gave many insights. Also, many thanks from her to CGIAR, Arwen Bailey, Rosaline Remans and Natalia Estrada Carmona, who made the thesis possible. Alexandra gave a small overview of her work at the GIL conference 2023 on February 13th (https://gil-net.de/konferenzen/). By researching factors influencing rural farm women’s empowerment in agricultural development, Alexandra predicted how researchers could better capture gender in modeling efforts. She produced a generally applicable Decision Analysis impact pathway based on literature research. Therefore, she focused on poor, rural farm women in low- and middle-income countries, who are the main subject of rural agriculture development interventions for women’s empowerment. Her model step for step empowers women within their social environments through gains in the areas they are disadvantaged. Women can gain education and training, economic strength, agricultural resources, health care, and nutritious food, further strengthening their workability and, thus, financial resources. Based on the Decision Analysis model, she programmed a Shiny app called Femiaculture as a new tool for scientists to include empowerment in a local agricultural-related developmental context. The decision analysis model, therefore, is applicable to scientists within an online user interface. Within her thesis, Alexandra encourages scientists to use her information and rebuild the interface for local women. It bears a new potential for actual change: Scientists can generate access to the model for rural women who could estimate their possible local empowerment by using their individual inputs into the app. The literature-derived Decision Analysis shows that empowerment can be a better option than sticking to the status quo if violence against women is not exceeding. Concluding, versatile methodological approaches and more holistic, deeper, and diverse understandings of female empowerment could generate a more profound knowledge basis for future models. Holistic, system-oriented thinking and trans- and interdisciplinary research can reduce bias and include women as decision-makers over their empowerment.