Raghunathan, Kalyani

Quisumbing, Agnes R.

Malapit, Hazel J.

Myers, Emily

Heckert, Jessica

Meinzen-Dick, Ruth Suseela

Faas, Simone

We conduct a synthetic review of the literature examining relationships between domains of women’s empowerment and food system outcomes. Many studies report significant positive associations between women’s empowerment and intrahousehold gender equality with child dietary and nutrition outcomes, household food security, and agricultural production, but which aspect of empowerment matters for a particular outcome varies across contexts. Others document significant but mixed associations between empowerment indicators and women’s dietary diversity scores. The findings suggest women’s empowerment contributes to improved diets and nutritional status, especially for children, but that household wealth, gender norms and country-specific institutions remain important. Most papers reviewed were based on observational studies and therefore estimated associations; future research using experimental and quasi-experimental methods would add significantly to the evidence base.

Is women’s empowerment bearing fruit? Mapping women’s empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI) results using the gender and food systems framework

Kosec, Katrina

Karachiwalla, Naureen

Narayanan, Sudha

Kyle, Jordan

In 2005, India passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, “the Act”), a law guaranteeing all rural households 100 days of work at a minimum wage through the building of durable assets, which created one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the world. Now known as the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA (MGNREGA), a notable feature of the program is that it envisions a democratic, bottom-up process of choosing which durable assets would be built within a community. Toward this end, the Act gives citizens the right to participate in the process of identifying potential projects and delegates responsibility to village governments in selecting which assets to build. Yet, in the long history of public works programs, there has been limited research on how assets created under such workfare programs are selected, or how to increase the role of women or other marginalized groups in the decision-making process. The Act provides a list of permissible works that span natural resource management, individual and community assets, common infrastructure for women’s groups, and rural infrastructure more broadly. Given the scale of the program, the assets selected at the village level have tremendous potential to enhance rural resilience to unexpected shocks and crises, especially those related to climate change. This is important, as extreme weather events on the Indian subcontinent are increasing, both in frequency and in the magnitude of their impacts on agricultural productivity, household livelihoods, assets and incomes, and health and nutrition. These events, as well as their impacts on incomes, often affect women more severely (Mason and Agan 2015; Kosec et al. forthcoming). Understanding how to enhance women’s voice and agency within the process of selecting community assets is important for three major reasons. First, women and men may have different asset preferences (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004). Recent time-use survey data from India find that women spend far more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men (eight times as much) (India, NSO 2019). Thus, women may place relatively more value on projects that reduce effort in collecting fuel and water, for example. If their voices are not included in the asset selection process, the village could miss out on a range of development projects that would improve overall productivity, resilience, and well-being. Second, where projects are built affects who benefits from them. Households that had MGNREGA assets built on their own land or that live near an asset cultivate more land, use more inputs (including their own labor), and have higher agricultural output (Gehrke 2015; Muralidharan et al. 2021). Ensuring that women influence asset placement is thus critical. Third, greater participation and inclusivity in the process of selecting community development projects can increase the perceived legitimacy and satisfaction with projects, as well as willingness to contribute toward their construction and maintenance (Olken 2010). Within MGNREGA, households that report playing a greater role in project selection also report greater satisfaction with the usefulness, quality, and maintenance of the projects (Ranaware et al. 2015).

Women's voice and agency in choosing assets: A new study on MGNREGA in India

Headey, Derek D.

Herforth, Anna

Malnutrition is endemic in India. In 2015-16 some 38% of preschool children were stunted and 21% were wasted, while more than half of Indian mothers and children were anemic. There are many posited explanations for the high rates of malnutrition in India, but surprisingly few discuss the role of Indian diets, particularly the affordability of nutritious diets given low wages and the significant structural problems facing India’s agricultural sector. This study was undertaken to address knowledge gaps around the affordability of nutritious diets in rural India. To do so we used nationally representative rural price and wage data to estimate the least cost means of satisfying India-specific dietary recommendations, referred to as the Cost of a Recommended Diet (CoRD), and assess the affordability of this diet relative to male and female wages for unskilled laborers. Although we find that dietary costs increased substantially over 2001-2011 for both men and women, rural wage rates increased more rapidly, implying that nutritious diets became substantially more affordable over time. However, in absolute terms nutritious diets in 2011 were still expensive relative to unskilled wages, constituting approximately 50-60% of male and about 70-80% of female daily wages, and were often even higher relative to minimum wages earned from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Since many poor households have significant numbers of dependents and substantial non-food expenditure requirements, it follows that nutritious diets are often highly unaffordable for the rural poor; we estimate that 45-64% of the rural poor cannot afford a nutritious diet that meets India’s national food-based dietary guidelines. Our results point to the need to more closely monitor food prices through a nutritional lens, and to shift India’s existing food policies away from their heavy bias towards cereals. Achieving nutritional security in India requires a much more holistic focus on improving the affordability of the full range of nutritious food groups and ensuring that economic growth results in sustained income growth for the poor.

Affordability of nutritious diets in rural India

Alvi, Muzna Fatima

Sehgal, Mrignyani

Group-based interventions are fast gaining traction in developing countries, often bolstering existing government service delivery systems. Such groups provide development programs with a means of extending their reach to households and individuals that might otherwise not seek public goods and services. However, the very reliance on the notion of “community” in these programs can constrain participation to those with a shared identity. In India, shared caste identity remains a central, and often controversial, element in many community-based programs. We explore the salience of caste identity with a field experiment conducted among women’s self-help groups in an eastern state of India. The experiment focused on the provision of information on nutrition, diet, and kitchen gardens. Specifically, we test the interplay between (a) the provision of information to self-help groups and (b) the caste identity of the information provider relative to the group’s caste identity, to assess what matters more –the message or the messenger. We randomize two treatments – an information treatment and ahomophily treatment – and measure the effect of these treatments on two outcomes: group members’willingness to contribute to a group-owned club good (a collectively managed kitchen garden), andindividual members’ retention of the information they received. We find that (1) information is veryimportant, (2) homophily, or shared caste identity with the information provider, is not that important,but (3) higher-caste information providers elicit greater willingness to contribute. These findings haveseveral implications for the design of public programs that rely on community-based organizations andagents as implementing partners and may thus be susceptible to identity issues, such as the exclusionof lower castes from certain occupations, public spaces or public goods.

The role of social identity in shaping economic choices: Evidence from women’s self-help groups in India

Raghunathan, Kalyani

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