Reviewer’s report
Title: 
Understanding female and male empowerment in Burkina Faso using the
project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI): A
longitudinal study
Version: 
1 
Date: 
10 Mar 2021
Reviewer's report:
This is an interesting paper but its hard to grasp why the results seem to be
complex with comparison group improving or not improving. Were their other
interventions ongoing in the comparison group? The title talks of women but the
results include men and women and so the title should be changed to reflect this.
Abstract: please put the acronym BRB in full. It might be better to explain in the
main paper that the treatment group started at a disadvantage. Why were the two
groups not balanced at sampling and how significant was the difference? it
seems they were different in many ways? religion, economically different and
more food secure? Also the results start with a statement saying treatment group
did not achieve empowerment, yet later it says the treatment group experienced
an increase in the average number of empowerment indicators. Its a bit a bit
confusing?
Main paper: How was the sample size calculated? 
can the statistics section
describe better what is meant by the DiD? including a reference to the modelling
and more detail. There is really very little different in school less than 1% so why
was this controlled for? I am also not sure why you did not look at other factors
such as income etc as many other factors were different?
Was there some difference in the way the data was collected to get results for the
men? it seems very odd that the groups were so different for male empowerment
at baseline and subsequently one decreased but was still much higher than
treatment? 
There is very little data on the participants 
and in fact only three variables are
shown and nothing on men and men are include din all the other tables? 
I think the discussion should first summarise the results before it goes into the
explanation of why they may have been what they were. I am not sure I
understand why men would loose empowerment in the comparison group? I find
it hard to follow and it is very long and might benefit from being made shorter.
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