Paula Kantor - AgWISE: A Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Perspective [1:00-6:09]

You Okay Good morning everyone. Thank you so much for being here today at this session of the Paula Cantor seminar this morning We are joined by two distinguished speakers presenting today Dr. Deepa Joshi and Mu Rani Sarger who will be presenting on their research Dr. Deepa Joshi is the gender youth and so an inclusion lead specialist at the International Water Management Institute She's a feminist political ecologist by training and her research has analyzed the shifts in environmental policies and how these restructure intersectional inequalities by gender, poverty, class, ethnicity and identity Her research on gender and water helps explore the links between urban and rural landscapes, particularly in relation to climate impacts She has hands-on experience in strengthening gender and inclusion capacity of policy, implementing and research stakeholders and institutions and informing policy relevant shifts on climate, urban agriculture and the environment food systems interface She has primarily worked in South Asia and to a lesser extent in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America She's currently based in Columbus, Sri Lanka We are also joined today by Mu Rani Sarger who's an assistant scientist, gender and gender research at the International Rice Research Institute based in DACA She's a socio-economist by training specializing in gender and labor dynamics in agri-food systems Her current research focuses on climate and water governance within broader dimensions of social inclusion She holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of the Philippines of Los Banos We greatly appreciate you both being here today and we're so excited for your presentation The floor is all yours if you want to start presentation Just to know you're both muted so we can't hear you Can you see my screen? Yes, everything is perfect Thank you very much for this opportunity And Mo and I are honored to be speaking at this Polar Contour, Gender and Development Hub seminar series Today we are going to take you to Bangladesh to talk about work that we've been doing to assess agriculture, water, insecurity, experiences And very much, of course, in light of the team of this entire series focusing on gender equality and social inclusion The next slide So just to give you an overview, we want to talk about water insecurity and women and how this is playing out in relation to agri-food systems And we also want to emphasize why this is so crucial and why this adds very unique lens on current understanding about women and water insecurity We talk about the methodology and the approach that we build on, which is the water insecurity experiences scale, the wise scales, which were designed by Northwestern University and have been piloted and tested in over 23 countries These scales are very specific and we'll talk about that in detail can be assessed for household water insecurity experiences as well as individual water insecurity experiences Our sort of unique take on building on these wise scales really focuses on bringing the perspective on agriculture, water insecurity experiences Which we, as we will explain, were not really captured in the current use of the wise scales We call what we have developed in partnership with Northwestern University, we call it the aquized module, because it's still a process in development We very much want to take that forward and to develop a scalable model that can be applied elsewhere and hopefully in the future we will be talking about agri-scaled as well