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The Women's empowerment in nutrition index

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  • Sudha Narayanan et al

    (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research
    Institute of Economic Growth)

Abstract

Rural women face many obstacles that thwart their well-being. Policies that seek to empower them, for example, by improving livelihood opportunities, often do not translate into improvements in other areas, notably in their nutritional status. Indeed, many existing measures of women's empowerment have ambiguous associations with indicators of nutritional status. This is likely because existing operationalizations of empowerment often focus on aspects that are somewhat distal from factors that influence nutrition. In this paper, we present an index that aims to measure women's empowerment in the realm of nutrition. We define nutritional empowerment as the process by which individuals acquire the capacity to be well fed and healthy, in a context where this capacity was previously denied to them Our index draws on theory and multi-site formative research from South Asia and captures multiple dimensions of empowerment spanning domains that influence nutritional outcomes. We construct this index using data from two sites in India and validate it by estimating two nutritional outcomes, body mass index (BMI) and anaemia, as a function of the index. We find that our index is significantly associated with these outcomes, indicating that in rural South Asia, the women's empowerment in nutrition index can assist researchers to understand the nutritional status of women and their families.

Suggested Citation

  • Sudha Narayanan et al, 2019. "The Women's empowerment in nutrition index," Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers 2019-020, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India.
    • Handle: RePEc:ind:igiwpp:2019-020
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    File URL: http://www.igidr.ac.in/pdf/publication/WP-2019-020.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    gender; rural; nutrition; South Asia; empowerment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I00 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General - - - General

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