Improving food and nutrition security by enhancing women’s empowerment
The main aim of this research is to enhance food and nutrition security through agriculture via and increase in women’s empowerment
— Robert Lensink, Principal Investigator
This project revolves around the questions,
How can empowering women benefit health and nutrition for families and communities in Ethiopia and Bangladesh?
How effective are interventions focused on women’s empowerment and child health, and how can we inform future policy to achieve global development goals?
One way to empower women, for instance, is to give them more control over financial resources, which could enable them to purchase more nutritious foods. However, there are many other dimensions of gender inequality.
Women’s empowerment (SDG 5) may improve nutrition (SDG 2), as women tend to be the main decision-makers about food preparation and allocation within a household.
However, there are many other dimensions of gender inequality. Prevailing gender norms can generate psychological constraints in women as well as inhibit their decision-making power.
This project seeks to improve our understanding of how tackling these different dimensions of women’s empowerment can impact food security and nutrition.
The early stages of this project are yielding valuable findings. Here is what we’ve learned so far:
Explore a summary of the preliminary findings from this project, shared in a concise two-pager that highlights key insights.
Improving food and nutrition security by enhancing women’s empowerment
Explore additional outputs from across the SDG Interactions project—including publications, interviews, and synthesised findings from all four themes—on the outputs page.
the focus countries and cases each look at the interactions between 3 SDGs:
ETHIOPIA
How gender equality (SDG 5) will affect agricultural technology adoption and its impact on food security (SDG 2) and child health (SDG 3)
BANGLADESH
Women’s empowerment programs (SDG 5) and health interventions (SDG 3) will be implemented to examine the effects of women’s empowerment on child nutrition (SDG 2)
The research consortium is led by Dr. Lensink, Professor of Finance and Financial Markets at the University of Groningen. The team consists of a diverse group of researchers across international universities and institutions.
Dr. Robert Lensink
Professor of Finance and Financial Markets, University of Groningen
The Netherlands
University of Passau
Germany
Haramaya University
Ethiopia
University Medical College Groningen
The Netherlands
BRAC University
Bangladesh
International Food Policy Research Institute
United States
For more information and updates from the research team in Groningen, click here