The Gender Inclusive Agribusiness Self-Assessment Tool
The Gender Inclusive Agribusiness Self-Assessment Tool will help you analyze your business' current practices with regards to gender inclusion in three key business areas:
- 1. Human capital management,
- 2. Productivity management, and
- 3. Market.
Who is this the Gender Inclusive Agribusiness Self-Assessment Tool for?
This tool is designed to be used by agribusiness managers and key decision-makers who want to know more about how their business' performance can be improved by inclusive practices and who also want to be change agents in the sectors and communities where they operate, by promoting women's inclusion in economic activities.
What will this self-assessment tell you?
Your results will show you where women are in relation to your company as employees and as produce suppliers. This gendered perspective will allow you to identify barriers to women's participation and design strategies and practices that will help you unleash women's economic potential, contributing to your business' overall performance and bringing life-changing opportunities to women and families around your business.
The Gender Inclusive Agribusiness Self-Assessment Tool is rooted in the belief that by improving management systems and practices, businesses can improve economic performance and social inclusion. The results of your self-assessment invite you to focus on the strategic relationship between inclusive systems and practices and the identified gender gaps in the three core business areas mentioned above. This relationship requires particular attention as it provides insights into the types of organizational changes you can introduce to improve performance, productivity and market share.
By taking a closer look at policies and systems you will learn the following:
- 1. What policies, practices and data are currently influencing decision-making processes in your organization, and which might be preventing your business from being more inclusive, and from benefiting from women's valuable contributions to economic activity and social development.
- 2. How your current results, policies and practices are actually affecting your overall performance.
- 3. What practical steps you can take in order to improve your practices around inclusion by providing your business with a starting point and a potential roadmap for action.
Actions to address the results of your diagnostic reports
The report from your self-assessment will offer you a collection of potential strategies to test and potentially scale up if successful. Certainly, the list will not be exhaustive, but recommendations included in the report have been developed in collaboration with agribusinesses facing similar challenges and offer an innovative way to incorporate gendered approaches as part of your business practices.
Based on the results of your self-assessment, here are some of the options for your business to increase gender inclusion in your work, and to track the impact of these actions:
- Improve the gender balance of your management structures.
- Increase women's participation in areas of your business currently occupied primarily by men.
- Balance the distribution of men and women in different types of roles.
- Offer development opportunities to women staff to improve upward mobility of women.
- Close the productivity gap between men and women suppliers.
- Offer tailored services for women suppliers/producers.
- Design product offers that respond to differentiated needs and wants of women and men.
Any of these possibilities will imply a revision of current policies and practices, and more specific recommendations will be provided to you based on your responses.
How to prioritize actions:
It will be important for you to consider your existing business challenges in order to decide what is the most convenient action to start with. Are these related to employee retention, to overall operational performance, to unreliable or unstable supply of produce, to difficulties in developing a product offer that helps you drive sales up? Answers to this question will help you prioritize actions going forward.
This assessment includes a series of questions related to human capital management, productivity management and market. You can navigate the test to check the questions, save your progress and complete your test later if you need to. All questions should be answered for you to see your self-assessment report.