Dear Facilitators,
I would like to share my experience and though focusing on question # 4, what is the link between dietary diversity, women’s engagement with agriculture, and access to ecosystem services?
As we all know, agricultural livelihoods affect nutrition of individual household members through multiple pathways and interactions. Among the multiple pathways, the following three pathways in particular are viewed as potentially promising entry points for improving nutritional status of smallholder household members through enhancing diet quality:
- Food production (Diversifying production to include nutritious fruits, vegetables and animal products)
- Agricultural income (Improving smallholder commercialization to generate income to purchase a healthier diet)
- Women’s empowerment including the decision-making power related to income, time, labor, assets, and knowledge or preferences of female which enable them to improve their purchasing decisions, healthcare decisions, family planning decisions, and spousal communication. Since this discussion is focused on transforming gender relations in agriculture through women’s empowerment, let me focus only on the role of the third pathways to improve household dietary diversity score (HDDS) based on evidence.
A study conducted by Jenifer Coates and Tina Galante in Ethiopia to assess production diversity and women empowerment revealed that for male headed households, the result shows that each 1, 000 birr of additional agricultural income was associated with 0.04 food group increase in HDDS (p<0.01). The coefficient on the interaction of female households headship with total agricultural income was significantly positive, at 0.07, meaning agricultural commercialization had a larger effect on household dietary diversity for female headed household (P<0.010) .
The same study also disclosed that female asset ownership and literacy were much stronger and significantly associated with dietary diversity than were agricultural income or production diversity. Female assets ownership was associated with a significantly higher probability of the consumption of roots, vegetables, oils/fat, sugar/honey, and meat (all significant at P<0.05, or less) whereas female literacy was only found to be significantly associated with a 48% increase in pulse consumption (P<0.05)
Impact Assessment of Yekokeb Berhan Program (USAID Funded Program implemented in Ethiopia) also revealed that the proportion of target beneficiaries (mostly female household head) that eat three plus meals per day has increased from 49% at baseline to over 78%, while non-target beneficiaries were more likely to have only two meals per day.
These findings tell us agriculture programs that empower women and enable them to have greater control over asset and other decision-making will likely see improved dietary diversity. Therefore to enable women in South Asia to manage the competing pressures of agriculture, childcare and household responsibilities to improve household wellbeing and nutrition, programs and policies better to be designed to improve Economic opportunities of women focusing on:
- Improving women’s access to financial services
- Promoting a savings culture
- Building women’s capacity to better select and manage their economic enterprises and resources
- Increasing women’s incomes and ability to create assets
Mr. Mebit Kebede