Women’s empowerment in livestock-focused agriculture: Identifying and understanding pathways to impact for maternal and child nutrition in East Africa

Project Summary

Principal investigator(s):

Amy Webb Girard Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University

Paula Dominguez-Salas Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich

Isabelle Baltenweck ILRI

Delia Grace International livestock Research Institute

Duration:

36 months (from September 2015)

Value:

£249,486

Countries of research:

Ethiopia,

Tanzania,

Uganda

Lead organisation: Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University

Principal investigator:

Amy Webb Girard, Emory University

Collaborators:

Usha Ramakrishnan, Emory University
Kathryn Yount, Emory University
Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere, Emory University
Paula Dominguez-Salas, RVC/ILRI/LCIRAH
Isabelle Baltenweck, ILRI
Delia Grace, ILRI

The team, bringing together experts in maternal and child nutrition, livestock-focused agriculture and women’s empowerment, will develop new metrics for women’s empowerment and animal source foods intakes that are sensitive to maternal and child nutrition and relevant to different livestock value chains, including pork, dairy cattle and poultry.

To achieve this we will capitalise on funded research-for-development projects in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda to:

Conduct mixed methods research to inform tool development and refinement
Evaluate validity of developed tools
Integrate the tools into the monitoring, learning and evaluation strategies of each project
Utilise data collected to analyse the pathways through which livestock-focused interventions influence women’s empowerment and maternal and child nutrition.