Full Title
The Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI): Measuring nutritional empowerment for better diagnostics
Session Overview
Undernutrition remains a widespread problem, perhaps especially for women and their children. In this session, we introduce the concept of women’s nutritional empowerment, which we define as the process by which individuals acquire the capacity to be well fed and healthy, in a context where this capacity was previously denied to them. We then present our framework to measure nutritional empowerment: the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI). WENI can help researchers and practitioners identify factors that limit or support nutritional outcomes for women and their families. We will discuss recent WENI findings from India and how to operationalize WENI.
Learning Objectives/Outcomes
The learning objectives are:
1. Introduce the concept of nutritional empowerment, and why it matters for ag-nutrition-health linkages
2. Introduce our approach to measuring nutritional empowerment: the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index.
3. Briefly discuss our findings from India. Our results show that WENI is robust and strongly associated with nutritional outcomes.
4. Introduce Toolkit (including overview of WENI, survey materials, index construction) and how to operationalize WENI. The short WENI collects 35 indicators that can be adapted to local contexts.
Target Audience
Individuals interested in measurement, in gender, or in how empowerment can contribute to women’s wellbeing.
Format
Group work, presentations
Level & Prerequisites
Basic