Women's empowerment and child nutrition in South-Central Asia; how important is socioeconomic status?

Abstract

Women's empowerment has been identified as an important strategy for improving children's nutrition outcomes in many settings. Empowerment indexes that are built from cross-country routine surveys are increasingly being developed, and further disaggregated analyses of such indexes are needed to examine in-depth, the relationship between women's empowerment and outcomes including children's nutrition. The Demographic and Health Surveys across five countries in South-Central Asia was used to examine the relationship between women's empowerment and children's nutrition outcomes. Empowerment was measured using the three domains (attitude to violence, social independence, and decision-making) in the Survey-based Women's emPowERment (SWPER) index. Main and interaction effects between the SWPER domains and women's wealth index were examined to check if there is a differential positive impact of empowerment for poorer women on children's nutrition outcomes. Outcome measures were children's height-for-age, weight-for-age, and weight-for-height z-scores. Marginal effects of logistic regression and OLS were used to examine main effects and linear probability models and OLS for interaction effects. Analyses were cluster-adjusted, sample-weighted, and important control variables were included. Significance was established at 95% and 99% confidence intervals. In South-Central Asia, to reduce stunting wasting and underweight rates, empowering women through improving their social independence and decision-making power might be important. Furthermore, targeting poorer women for empowerment in social independence and decision-making appears to confer positive benefits towards the reduction of stunting, wasting, and underweight rates in children. However, the main and interaction effects of women's empowerment and wealth index on children's nutrition outcomes vary across the countries examined. These variations suggests that exogenous contextual factors might play a role in the empowerment-nutrition and empowerment-wealth-nutrition associations and interactions.