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Enhancing health and nutrition outcomes has long been a goal across agricultural development projects, and increasingly such projects look to engage women and increase gender equality. While existing evidence shows nutrition and health projects can improve women's and children's health and nutrition, little is known about project impacts on women's health- and nutrition-related agency.
In response to this knowledge gap, we developed a complementary module for the project-level women's empowerment in agriculture index (pro-WEAI) to measure health- and nutrition-related agency (pro-WEAI+HN). In total, there are seven indicators in this optional module. The pro-WEAI+HN indicators were developed using data from six agricultural development programs implemented across Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Mali. Tests of association (Cramer's V) and redundancy suggest that the pro-WEAI+HN indicators measured aspects of agency that are distinct from the core pro-WEAI.
The seven indicators include women's agency in the areas of:
- Her own health and diet
- Her health and diet during pregnancy
- Her child's diet
- Breastfeeding and weaning
- Purchasing food and health products; and
- Acquiring food and health products
We recommend using the pro-WEAI+HN module for studies that emphasize health and nutrition in their pathways to empowerment. Increased uptake of the pro-WEAI+HN indicators may strengthen the evidence on how such programming can enhance women's empowerment and improve health and nutrition outcomes for themselves and their children.
To download the pro-WEAI+HN tools, please visit the "Guides and Instruments" page.