Empowerment and nutrition in Niger: insights from the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition grid

Abstract

We present a novel application of a regression decomposition technique, the Shapley Owen decomposition, to identify the aspects of empowerment associated with undernutrition in Niger. Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world, and has fared consistently poorly on a range of human development indicators, including women's nutritional status. Nutritional status is the outcome of a complex set of interdependent factors; empowerment too is a multidimensional concept. It is often unclear which policy interventions unequivocally empower women in ways that improve nutritional wellbeing. We aim to identify areas of intervention by categorizing the drivers of nutrition into a series of domains (food, health, fertility and institutions) and empowerment dimensions (knowledge, resources, and agency). We then we predict body mass and anemia based on these domain-dimensions and other controls using Demographic and Health Survey data for Niger. Broadly, we find that access to the domain-dimensions of health resources and fertility resources play a substantial role in nutritional outcomes in Niger. We also consider variations across subpopulations. By identifying the relative contribution of each domain-dimension, our approach offers a unique insight into what sectors are most closely related to the nutritional status of Nigerien women.

Women’s Empowerment, Food Security, and Nutrition Transition in Africa

“…Furthermore, underlying the importance of empowerment, a milk-based intervention research study [41] noted that unless women had control over resources, the intervention did not necessarily cause nutritional improvement, particularly among children. Other studies [42,43] also disclosed the existence of positive relationship between women's empowerment and household nutritional improvement.…”

“…Flodqvist [35] Women's empowerment and dietary diversity Positive association, except for empowerment in access to credit Ambikapathi et al [27]; Quisumbing et al [32]; O'Neill [36]; Galie et al [37]; Mindy et al [38]; Galie et al [39]; Jones et al [40]; Lentz et al [42]; Onah et al [43] Women's empowerment and nutrition improvement…”

Revisiting food security in 2021: an overview of the past year

“…Another theme among the nutrition-oriented articles of 2021 is the issues of equity and empowerment. Harris et al ( 2021 ) for instance consider how and why nutrition outcomes are poorer for ethnic minority groups in Vietnam; Lentz et al ( 2021 ) show that women’s empowerment are associated with their nutritional status in Niger; and Maia and Santos ( 2021 ) assess the socio-demographic drivers of food insecurity for children in Portugal. Focusing on interventions and actions, Cauchi et al ( 2021 ) draw on community perspectives to understand perceptions of healthy food; and Nordhagen and Traoré ( 2021 ) examine the sustainability of women’s groups in facilitating nutrition-sensitive agriculture.…”

Women's agency in nutrition in the association between women's empowerment in agriculture and food security: A case study from Uganda

“…The recent Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI) served to introduce an approach aimed at quantifying empowerment in nutrition (Narayanan et al, 2019(Narayanan et al, , 2022. The explicit focus of WENI researchers is on the quantification of nutrition-focused empowerment, which was shown to be a statistically significant and meaningful predictor of body mass index (BMI), anemia, and women's minimum dietary diversity (Gupta et al, 2022;Lentz et al, 2021;Narayanan et al, 2019;Saha & Narayanan, 2022).…”