Bangladesh and Ethiopia

Improving food and nutrition security by enhancing women’s empowerment in Bangladesh and Ethiopia

There is increasing evidence that empowering women is a determining factor of malnutrition, because women’s empowerment affects contemporaneous outcomes such as household food security and dietary diversity as well as women’s own BMI, which in turn has intergenerational effects on children’s nutritional status. However, women’s empowerment has many dimensions and not all are conducive to better nutrition. The precise pathways via which women's empowerment may affect nutrition security are only poorly understood. We start from the assumption that more evidence is needed on what kind of interventions can enhance women’s empowerment in a way that addresses the underlying determinants of malnutrition to achieve SDG 2 and to end all forms of malnutrition. We will develop a conceptual framework that lays out the pathways from women’s empowerment to improved nutrition. Based on this framework, we will then develop and test two new scalable training modules that focus on psychological constraints and gender norms to improve women’s empowerment, with the aim to ultimately improve nutrition and food security. The project mainly focuses on Bangladesh and Ethiopia.