Hunger and undernutrition disproportionately affect women. Recent research has identified women’s empowerment as a critical factor for nutritional outcomes. Despite this interest, ways that policymakers and practitioners can support empowerment as it relates to nutrition remain unclear.

The Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI) will be applied in East Africa for the first time, validating it against anthropometric and dietary diversity outcomes, as was done under an IMMANA grant in rural South Asia. Second, a cross-metric assessment of consistency across and predictive ability of several key empowerment metrics will be included.

This project will partner with an existing program in Samburu County, northern Kenya, to collect a set of the most commonly used empowerment metrics that are used to assess key nutrition-related outcomes. Using these data, researchers will assess the relationships between WENI and nutritional outcomes, and compare WENI with existing alternative indices. Samburu County, which is mostly arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) and has high poverty and malnutrition rates, offers an important site for validating WENI. ASALs are 43 percent of Africa’s land area and home to more than 265 million pastoralists (African Union 2010). Samburu’s highlands are also home to agro-pastoralists and agriculturalists, which provide the opportunity for assessing the indices across a range of livelihoods. 

As a consequence of limited cross-validation of empowerment metrics, little is known about when to use which metric to track empowerment in nutrition-related projects and programs. Further, donors and implementing agencies invest large sums in such metrics without strong evidence that the they are effective for a given purpose, or whether the added expense of more complex metrics adds worthwhile value. This project seeks to validate WENI alongside other nutrition-relevant empowerment metrics to address this information gap.

Click here to read about the Round 1 IMMANA Grant project that developed WENI.