Two main dimensions were impacted in a positive way as a result of IFAD’s interventions: women saw an increase in decision-making power, and women saw an increase in asset ownership.

Women’s decision making power is defined as women’s ability to decide on the use of resources either solely or jointly with men, whereby resources are most commonly defined as income followed by any other monetary sources, and production endowments.

Asset ownership is measured through indicators such as women’s ownership of durable productive or non-productive assets, livestock and land.

A meta-analysis of these indicators for the 24 projects assessed has been performed. Results show that women living in households that benefited from an IFAD project, have 27% more decision making power than women in households that did not. The impact on asset ownership is not significantly different between women living in beneficiary households and women living in comparison households.

IFAD’s interventions have laid the foundation for women’s empowerment, enabling women’s decision-making power, which may likely provide the basis for an increase in asset ownership in the future but which also require broader and more comprehensive approach which has been embedded in IFAD’s project design through the mainstreaming themes and the gender action plan.

IFAD’s beneficiaries are not among the main contributors of GHG emissions, yet they are both exposed to and directly impacted by climate change. Supporting beneficiaries to adapt to climate change is one of the top priorities for IFAD. Analysing the impact and documenting the evidence of how adapting systematically to climate change has affected communities, has been an important objective of Impact Assessments carried out by IFAD. The Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP) has been instrumental in driving the ambitious climate mainstreaming in IFAD's portfolio as well as in determining the current IFAD’s modus operandi.

Climate change adaptation is a context-specific process, as are livelihood and production strategies. It is influenced and determined by the natural resource base existing in each context, by infrastructure available and by the types, intensity and frequency of risks and shocks to which different contexts are exposed. For example, the adaptation options needed in the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam are different from those needed in the drought-prone areas of Mauritania or Malawi or to prevent impacts of erosion from the steep Andean fields. As such, solutions – in terms of policy and investments – have to be context specific.

Given the context specificity requirement of adaptation, the analysis conducted and reported has required that a detailed study of the context and of the adaptation options promoted be carried out for each project.

Results show that generally speaking, impacts on adoption for beneficiaries is significantly higher compared to the control group, ranging from 7 percentage points in Bolivia to 69 percentage points in Kyrgyzstan (for the most adopted practice in each project). However, in many cases, the adoption rate is still relatively low.