Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help?
Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outc...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | Inglés |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10568/152094 |
| _version_ | 1855528412196634624 |
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| author | Kumar, Neha Raghunathan, Kalyani Quisumbing, Agnes R. Scott, Samuel P. Menon, Purnima Thai, Giang Gupta, Shivani Nichols, Carly WINGS study team |
| author_browse | Gupta, Shivani Kumar, Neha Menon, Purnima Nichols, Carly Quisumbing, Agnes R. Raghunathan, Kalyani Scott, Samuel P. Thai, Giang WINGS study team |
| author_facet | Kumar, Neha Raghunathan, Kalyani Quisumbing, Agnes R. Scott, Samuel P. Menon, Purnima Thai, Giang Gupta, Shivani Nichols, Carly WINGS study team |
| author_sort | Kumar, Neha |
| collection | Repository of Agricultural Research Outputs (CGSpace) |
| description | Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition intervention delivered through women’s SHGs in five states in central and eastern India. The interventions involved the delivery of nutrition behavior change communication to groups through participatory approaches, community engagement around key issues, and the strengthening of collective organizations. Our analysis is based on three rounds of rich panel data on close to 2700 rural women and their households from eight districts in these five states and qualitative work from an accompanying process evaluation. Using difference-in-difference models with nearest neighbor matching methods, we present results on women’s anthropometry and diet-related outcomes.
We do not observe any improvements in women’s BMI or overall dietary diversity. Although more women in the nutrition intensification arm consumed animal source foods, nuts and seeds, and fruits, this was not enough to increase overall dietary diversity scores or the proportion of women achieving minimum dietary diversity. We measure intermediate outcomes along the program’s impact pathways and find improvements in household incomes, cultivation of home gardens, and utilization of government schemes but not in women’s empowerment. The lack of improvement in anthropometry and diets despite changes in some intermediate outcomes can be attributed to several factors such as low implementation intensity, poor facilitator capacity and incentives, the lack of relevance of the BCC topics to the average SHG member, and resource and agency constraints to adoption of recommended practices. Although we do not have data to test the parallel trends assumption and so do not interpret our results as causal, these findings do suggest that optimism about using group-based platforms needs to be tempered in resource-poor contexts. |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | CGSpace152094 |
| institution | CGIAR Consortium |
| language | Inglés |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publishDateRange | 2024 |
| publishDateSort | 2024 |
| publisher | Elsevier |
| publisherStr | Elsevier |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | CGSpace1520942025-10-26T12:53:06Z Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? Kumar, Neha Raghunathan, Kalyani Quisumbing, Agnes R. Scott, Samuel P. Menon, Purnima Thai, Giang Gupta, Shivani Nichols, Carly WINGS study team agriculture body mass index maternal nutrition self-help groups women nutrition education Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition intervention delivered through women’s SHGs in five states in central and eastern India. The interventions involved the delivery of nutrition behavior change communication to groups through participatory approaches, community engagement around key issues, and the strengthening of collective organizations. Our analysis is based on three rounds of rich panel data on close to 2700 rural women and their households from eight districts in these five states and qualitative work from an accompanying process evaluation. Using difference-in-difference models with nearest neighbor matching methods, we present results on women’s anthropometry and diet-related outcomes. We do not observe any improvements in women’s BMI or overall dietary diversity. Although more women in the nutrition intensification arm consumed animal source foods, nuts and seeds, and fruits, this was not enough to increase overall dietary diversity scores or the proportion of women achieving minimum dietary diversity. We measure intermediate outcomes along the program’s impact pathways and find improvements in household incomes, cultivation of home gardens, and utilization of government schemes but not in women’s empowerment. The lack of improvement in anthropometry and diets despite changes in some intermediate outcomes can be attributed to several factors such as low implementation intensity, poor facilitator capacity and incentives, the lack of relevance of the BCC topics to the average SHG member, and resource and agency constraints to adoption of recommended practices. Although we do not have data to test the parallel trends assumption and so do not interpret our results as causal, these findings do suggest that optimism about using group-based platforms needs to be tempered in resource-poor contexts. 2024-10 2024-09-10T19:36:23Z 2024-09-10T19:36:23Z Journal Article https://hdl.handle.net/10568/152094 en Open Access Elsevier Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Scott, Samuel P.; Menon, Purnima; Thai, Giang; Gupta, Shivani; Nichols, Carly; and WINGS study team. 2024. Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? Food Policy 128(October 2024): 102716. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102716 |
| spellingShingle | agriculture body mass index maternal nutrition self-help groups women nutrition education Kumar, Neha Raghunathan, Kalyani Quisumbing, Agnes R. Scott, Samuel P. Menon, Purnima Thai, Giang Gupta, Shivani Nichols, Carly WINGS study team Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? |
| title | Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? |
| title_full | Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? |
| title_fullStr | Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? |
| title_full_unstemmed | Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? |
| title_short | Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? |
| title_sort | women improving nutrition through self help groups in india does nutrition information help |
| topic | agriculture body mass index maternal nutrition self-help groups women nutrition education |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/10568/152094 |
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