Adapting the Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index: Lessons from Kenya

Women face a disproportionate burden of malnutrition and food insecurity.

Research has shown that women’s empowerment can buffer women against nutritional problems.

This study contributes to ongoing efforts to measure women’s empowerment that are both context-sensitive and universal, focusing on the recently developed Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI).

Earlier research has shown it is both a valid construct and positively related to dietary and nutritional outcomes of women in South Asia.

The present study established that WENI is generalizable to agropastoral and pastoral Kenya, an area with substantially different livelihoods, food system, norms, and institutions than South Asia.

The study found that a locally contextualized WENI is strongly associated with women’s body mass index and dietary diversity as well as household level food insecurity.

The authors also present findings for two shorter variations of WENI: an abbreviated WENI (A-WENI) and a cross context WENI (CC-WENI).

A-WENI contains a small subset of WENI indicators identified using machine learning with South Asian data and therefore is context-specific. CC-WENI does not contain indicators specific to the validation context. They perform comparably well with caveats.

Thus, as use of WENI expands, the authors of the study recommend adapting WENI for in-depth analyses of women’s nutritional empowerment; using CC-WENI for cross-context comparisons; and using A-WENI for rapid appraisals of community level progress in a given context.

Citation
Lentz, E., Jensen, N., Lepariyo, W., Narayanan, S. and Bageant, E. 2025. Adapting the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index: Lessons from Kenya. World Development 188: 106887.

Photo: A pastoralist milks her goat, Borana, Ethiopia (credit: ILRI/Zerihun Sewunet)