What empowerment indicators are important for food consumption for women? Evidence from 5 sub-Sahara African countries.

Michael Nnachebe Onah,Sue Horton,John Hoddinott,Kannan Navaneetham

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0250014

Abstract

This paper draws on data from five sub-Sahara African countries; Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique consisting of 10,041 married women who were cohabitating with a male spouse. The study aim was to investigate the relationship between women's empowerment and women's dietary diversity and consumption of different food items. Women's empowerment was measured using the indicators in the five domains of Women's Empowerment in Agriculture index (WEAI) and women's dietary diversity and food consumption was examined using the women's dietary diversity score (WDDS) measure. OLS and LPM regressions were used and analyses were confirmed using marginal effects from Poisson and logistic regressions. Results suggest that three out of the 10 WEAI indicators of empowerment showed different magnitude and direction in significant associations with improved WDDS and varied associations were found in three out of the five countries examined. In addition, the three significant empowerment indicators were associated with the consumption of different food groups in three out of the five countries examined suggesting that diverse food groups account for the association between the WEAI and WDDS. Improved autonomy, and input in production were associated with improved likelihoods of consumption of dairy products, and fruits and vegetables including vitamin A-rich produce. Empowerment in public speaking was associated with improved consumption of other fruits and vegetables including vitamin A-rich produce. The varied nature of empowerment indicators towards improving women's dietary diversity and food consumption suggests that different empowerment strategies might confer different benefits towards the consumption of different food groups. Further, findings imply that interventions that seek to empower women should tailor their strategies on existing contextual factors that impact on women.

Highlights

Improving women’s nutrition outcomes through better access to a more diverse diet has been identified as a key strategy towards improving the lives and livelihoods of women [1,2,3]
Individual food groups were examined as dichotomous outcome variables in line with our hypothesis that the different domains and indicators of women’s empowerment would have differential impacts on women’s consumption of individual food groups. This was informed by the qualitative study on economic empowerment and women’s dietary diversity conducted by the same researchers [59] where we found that economic empowerment would be important for the consumption of some food items including expensive-to-purchase items but would not be as important for the consumption of staple food items
On average and across the five sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries examined, women consumed three out of nine food groups of the women’s dietary diversity score (WDDS) except for Zambia where women consumed food items belonging to four food groups (Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

Improving women’s nutrition outcomes through better access to a more diverse diet has been identified as a key strategy towards improving the lives and livelihoods of women [1,2,3]. In many LMICs especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), existing cultural norms and practices tend to be patriarchal and patrilineal which favour men, and these norms further create a gender divide that limit women’s empowerment and access to resources including food [30, 35, 36] While these norms are prevalent in many LMICs, they tend to be context-specific and vary within and across countries and have differential impact on women. Our study has been restricted to sampled households in rural areas with women in a union and with information on women’s dietary diversity where the relationship between women’s empowerment as measured by the WEAI and women’s consumption of different food groups (dietary diversity) was explored. Domain Indicator Production 1.1 Input in productive decisions 1.2 Autonomy in production

Speaking in public

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion