The nutrition impacts of women’s empowerment in Kenyan agriculture: Application of the multinomial endogenous switching treatment regression

Abstract

Using household and individual survey data in rural Kenya, this paper assesses the impacts of women’s empowerment in agriculture individually as well as in combination with push–pull technology (PPT) on women’s and households’ nutritional status. We adopt a multiple treatment endogenous switching regression framework to control for potential endogeneity of women’s empowerment. The analysis shows that women’s empowerment has a positive and significant effect on women’s and households’ dietary diversity scores. The impact is significantly higher for empowered women belonging to PPT-adopting households than for their counterparts who have not adopted PPT. Similarly, disempowered women from PPT-adopting households have higher dietary diversity scores compared with disempowered women from non-adopting households. These results imply that individual and household welfare could be enhanced to a greater degree by combining women’s empowerment with technology adoption than by treating the two elements as separate development issues.