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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Liangzhi You

Liangzhi You is a Senior Research Fellow and theme leader in the Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, based in Washington, DC. His research focuses on climate resilience, spatial data and analytics, agroecosystems, and agricultural science policy. Gridded crop production data of the world (SPAM) and the agricultural technology evaluation model (DREAM) are among his research contributions. 

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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experts

Nutrition, Diets, and Health

Neha Kumar

Senior Research Fellow

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Bio

Neha Kumar is a Senior Research Fellow in the Nutrition, Diets, and Health Unit at IFPRI. Neha is an economist by training and has an accumulated expertise that spans the diverse sectors of agriculture, social protection, gender, and nutrition-focused programs. Since joining IFPRI, she has been involved in several complex and multidimensional impact evaluations, including social protection programs like the Productive Safety Net Program in Ethiopia, agriculture-nutrition interventions such as the HarvestPlus-funded biofortified Orange Sweet Potato program in Uganda and Mozambique and the Improved Vegetables and Fish Technology Intervention in Bangladesh. She has expertise and substantial experience with using state-of-the-art econometric techniques for impact evaluation. Neha holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University.

Languages spoken: English, Hindi

Publications

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Publications

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Working Paper

Securing food, building livelihoods? A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme

2024Hoddinott, John; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Kumar, Neha; Lind, Jeremy; Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum
Details

Securing food, building livelihoods? A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme

-We assess the impact of a large-scale social protection intervention, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), over a 15-year period. -We find that the PSNP had a positive impact on food security but inconsistent impacts on assets. There were positive impacts on fertilizer use, investments in terracing, and cereal yields but only when the program was twinned with complementary programming. -The PSNP enabled households to be more resilient to covariate shocks. There were no adverse incentive effects on labour supply or fertility. There is some evidence that it improved schooling outcomes and reduced child labour but not child nutrition outcomes. -Payment levels, uncertainty about when payments would take place, and processes associated with making payments all played a role in generating these mixed impacts. -These also illustrate that while complementary programming can enhance the impact of transfers, adding complementary programming at scale is challenging when resources are limited.

Year published

2024

Authors

Hoddinott, John; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Kumar, Neha; Lind, Jeremy; Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum

Citation

Hoddinott, John; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Kumar, Neha; Lind, Jeremy; Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel; and Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum. 2024. Securing food, building livelihoods? A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme. WIDER Working Paper 2024/76. Helsinki: UNU-WIDER. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2024/539-4

Country/Region

Ethiopia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Food Security; Social Protection; Fertilizers; Terrace Cropping; Cereal Crops; Resilience; Labour; Nutrition

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.35188/unu-wider/2024/539-4 Source record

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Working Paper

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Brief

Food environment research in Sri Lanka: A desk review

2024Clarke, Rebecca Namara; Sehgal, Mrignyani; Marshall, Quinn; Kumar, Neha
Details

Food environment research in Sri Lanka: A desk review

Key Findings • Research has documented the availability of modern food retail (e.g. fast-food) in both urban and rural contexts, and its influence especially on adolescents. • Barriers to accessing healthy diets include the high cost of nutritious foods, especially vegetables and animal source foods, the time needed to cook fresh meals, and food safety • Most research to date has utilized cross-sectional designs, with relatively few studies examining associations with diet or health outcomes, or evaluating interventions.

Year published

2024

Authors

Clarke, Rebecca Namara; Sehgal, Mrignyani; Marshall, Quinn; Kumar, Neha

Citation

Clarke, Rebecca Namara; Sehgal, Mrignyani; Marshall, Quinn; and Kumar, Neha. 2024. Food environment research in Sri Lanka: A desk review. FRESH Brief November 2024. CGIAR Initiative on FRESH. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

Country/Region

Sri Lanka

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Adolescents; Capacity Development; Diet Quality; Food Environment; Nutrition

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Fruit and Vegetables for Sustainable Healthy Diets

Record type

Brief

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Journal Article

Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help?

2024Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Scott, Samuel P.; Menon, Purnima; Thai, Giang; Gupta, Shivani; Nichols, Carly; WINGS study team
Details

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 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.

Year published

2024

Authors

Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Scott, Samuel P.; Menon, Purnima; Thai, Giang; Gupta, Shivani; Nichols, Carly; WINGS study team

Citation

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

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agriculture; Body Mass Index; Maternal Nutrition; Self-help Groups; Women; Nutrition Education

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102716 Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Journal Article

Blogs

Why gender-sensitive social protection is critical to the COVID-19 response in low- and middle-income countries
IFPRI Blog
 | 
April 28, 2020

Why gender-sensitive social protection is critical to the COVID-19 response in low- and middle-income countries

By Melissa Hidrobo, Neha Kumar, Tia Palermo, Amber Peterman, and Shalini Roy

Governments ramping up pandemic assistance programs must take care to see they don't widen inequalities. 

Why gender matters in COVID-19 responses – now and in the future
IFPRI Blog
 | 
April 22, 2020

Why gender matters in COVID-19 responses – now and in the future

By Agnes Quisumbing, Neha Kumar, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Claudia Ringler

In low- and middle-income countries, women are key to practical efforts to limit the spread of coronavirus—but face many obstacles men do not.

International Women's Day: Self-help groups aid communication, empowerment in India
IFPRI Blog
 | 
March 08, 2018

International Women’s Day: Self-help groups aid communication, empowerment in India

By Neha Kumar, Kalyani Raghunathan, and Agnes Quisumbing

How rural women activists are bringing about change from the ground up.

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Events

Delivering for Nutrition in South Asia: Connecting the Dots Across Systems
IFPRI Program/Country Event

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December 3 to 5, 2024

Delivering for Nutrition in South Asia: Connecting the Dots Across Systems

South Asia grapples with escalating levels of malnutrition in various forms, including undernutrition, overweight and obesity, and micronutrient deficiencies, alongside increasing incidence of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Malnutrition results from a complex interplay of factors incorporating household and individual decision-making, agriculture and food systems, healthcare services, education, and socio-ecological systems that determine access to services and […]

South Asia Launch | Nepal | 2024 Global Food Policy Report: Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Nutrition
Series/Special Event

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August 8 to 9, 2024

South Asia Launch | Nepal | 2024 Global Food Policy Report: Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Nutrition

Despite significant progress in addressing hunger and undernutrition in the early 2000s, malnutrition, in all its forms, remains a major challenge in all regions of the world. Unhealthy diets remain the primary drivers of many forms of malnutrition, including undernutrition, overweight and obesity, micronutrient deficiencies, and diet- related noncommunicable diseases. Today, the number of people […]

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists
IFPRI at External Event

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August 2 to 7, 2024

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists

The triennial International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE-2024), centred on the theme “Transformation Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems” is scheduled from August 2-7, 2024, in New Delhi, India. The conference offers a distinctive platform, providing a golden opportunity for the agricultural academic institutions and researchers to convene in person, exchange knowledge, and actively contribute to the […]

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