Els Lecoutere

Bio

Els Lecoutere is co-leading the Area of Work Solutions for Impact of the CGIAR GENDER Accelerator. She is also the Science Officer of the GENDER Accelerator, a role through which she supports high-quality gender research. She previously led the CGIAR Research Initiative on Gender Equality HER+.

Examples of her research include mixed experimental, quantitative, and qualitative studies of the way power relations, including those shaped by gender, define the efficiency and equity of resource sharing within households and common pool resource systems in LMICs. She studied the effects of gender transformative interventions, including digital ones, on women’s empowerment and other outcomes such as climate adaptive capacities. She contributed to developing the climate–agriculture–gender inequality hotspot mapping methodology.  

Her research is situated at the intersection of feminist economics, development studies, and development economics. Her background in development economics and demography, combined with a PhD of Political Sciences, has allowed her to approach her research in a multidisciplinary way, applying qualitative and quantitative methods, including field experiments and lab-in-the-field experiments.

She lived and worked as a researcher in East-Africa for extended periods. She worked at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies (Ghent University), at the Institute of Development Policy (Antwerp University) and the Development Economics Group (Wageningen University) before joining CGIAR. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow from 2016 to 2018. She collaborated with teams involved with CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), and Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM).