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:

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

Resources

Publications:

• Intrinsic and instrumental agency associated with nutritional status of East African women
• Dietary Diversity Measures Derived from Food Frequency Methods Are Weak Proxies for Anthropometric Indicators of Child Nutrition in East Africa
• Women’s empowerment, food security and nutrition of pastoral communities in Tanzania
• The Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index
• Women’s empowerment in East Africa: Development of a cross-country comparable measure
• Women’s empowerment is associated with maternal and child diet diversity but not household food security in pastoral communities in Tanzania

Outcome story:

• Putting women first in the adoption and delivery of livestock vaccines

Presentations:

• ANH Academy Week 2018 - Women’s Empowerment: Pathways to Child Nutrition
• IUNS 21st Congress of Nutrition
• ANH Academy Week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, June 2016

Conference paper:

• Women’s empowerment is associated with maternal and child diet diversity but not household food security in pastoral communities in Tanzania

Blog:

• Research approaches required for supporting the empowerment of pastoral dairy women

Website:

• Women's Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI)

News coverage:

• Chickens and women’s empowerment: why the New York Times is wrong, The Devpolicy Blog, 7 September 2018