Rural Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition: A Framework Linking Food, Health and Institutions

Abstract

Undernutrition remains a wide spread problem, especially for women and their children. A wide body of research has identified women’s empowerment as a contributor to nutritional outcomes for children, and, to a lesser extent, for women themselves. Yet, evidence remains mixed, in part reflecting the difficulties of measuring empowerment, in general and as it relates to nutrition. In-depth interviews with women from rural South Asia reveal that women’s ability to achieve adequate nutritional outcomes often encompass factors overlooked in existing empowerment measures. Combining theories of empowerment and drivers of nutrition with rich case studies from Bangladesh and India, we formulate the concept of women’s nutritional empowerment. We then develop a framework, the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition grid, to measure and operationalise nutritional empowerment. Our contribution addresses the lack of a systematic approach in the use of empowerment measures in the nutrition literature by formalising a nutrition-focused definition of empowerment. Our conceptualisation offers a basis for a range of tools to inform the design and implementation of effective policies aimed at improving nutrition, with a specific focus on rural women.

Keywords:

• empowerment
• nutrition
• gender
• rural
• South Asia

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Correction

Acknowldgement

We gratefully acknowledge valuable collaborations with Nijera Kori, Sambhav, Anwesha, Agragamee, PRADAN and JJSS. We thank Nirali Bakhla, Sweta Bhushan, Jason Cons, Anuradha De, Ghida Ismail, Khushi Kabeer, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Ankita Mondal, Raj Patel, Rezanur Rahman, Krushna Ranaware, Udayan Rathore, Sabarmatee, Tiffany Wang, Emmanuel Teitelbaum, two anonymous reviewers, and participants at an Expert Group Meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 66) in Rome for facilitating our research and providing valuable discussions and comments. We alone remain responsible for any errors and omissions that remain. Anonymised interview data for the selected interviews is available upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Correction notice https://doi.org/10.1080/09637486. 1973727

Notes

1. There is growing recognition of this issue. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 62), 2018 emphasised the goal of ensuring food security and nutrition for the wellbeing and empowerment of rural women and girls.

2. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this valuable point.

3. While Kabeer’s conceptualisation of empowerment is one of many, in the past decade it has become the preferred starting point for most theoretically informed work aiming to measure empowerment (see Ballon, 2018). Her article on empowerment (1999) has been cited over 4100 times as of November, 2020.

4. Such restrictions may be internalised by women through what Sen (1999) refers to as adaptive preferences. An example is when women internalise their social status as persons of lesser value, behaving in ways that impact negatively their own wellbeing and/or the wellbeing of other female members of the family. A robust measure that captures each aspect of empowerment would enable researchers to disentangle whether respondents choose not to do something because they do not want to do it compared to because they are not allowed or not able do it.

5. We also interviewed 24 men in one site. Our intent is for the WEN gride to be applicable to any individual, although we focus on women here.

6. Our nutritional status outcome is qualitative, and derived from an emic perspective. Quantitative work that estimates nutritional achievements (for example, BMI and anaemia rates) as a function of the empowerment factors identified through this work has found these empowerment factors to be important driver nutritional status (Narayanan, Rathore, & Sharma, 2019b).

7. Women might be adequately nourished simply not as a result of an empowerment process, for example due to high socioeconomic status. However, we are especially concerned about situations of scarcity and deprivation. In these situations, a woman’s knowledge and ability to act to secure food might make a difference to her nutritional status. It therefore matters if nutritional outcomes reflect a meaningful choice or not.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a Competitive Research Grants to Develop Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA Grants), an initiative funded with UK aid from the British people, and a Policy Research Institute grant from the Lyndon B. Johnson School, University of Texas, Austin.