Food Systems

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 paper 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. We establish that WENI is generalizable to agropastoral and pastoral Kenya, an area with substantially different livelihoods, food system, norms, and institutions than South Asia. We find that a locally contextualized WENI is strongly associated with women’s body mass index and dietary diversity as well as household level food insecurity. We 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. We find that they perform comparably well with caveats. Thus, as use of WENI expands we 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.

Building Ethiopia’s food security resilience to climate and hydrological change

Historically Ethiopia’s food security has been sensitive to climatic variability, but changes in future weather and climate could lead to overall reductions and increased variability in agricultural production, without further adaptation. We present an integrated modelling assessment framework which combines climate, crop, and hydrological modelling to quantify future risks to Ethiopia’s food security. We explore the impacts of 2°C and higher climate change scenarios on water availability and crop yields and simulate how future climate shocks may impact Ethiopia’s food. We consider three adaptations to agricultural management practices (improved seed varieties, increased use of nitrogen fertilizer and supplementary irrigation) and quantify their effectiveness in enhancing the resilience of Ethiopia’s food system to climate and hydrological change by 2050. Results show that, without policy intervention, climate change creates a risk of declining Meher season crop yields across Ethiopia. Under the worst climate change scenario, teff (−12.0%), barley (−6.7%), and wheat (−4.4%) are projected to have the largest decline in average yields, whilst maize (−0.1%) and sorghum (+0.9%) yields are less impacted thanks to more favourable growing conditions. However, the results also indicate that the adaptation options have a bigger beneficial effect than the climate impact. Of the policies evaluated, improved seeds have a relatively greater effect than increased fertilizer use. Supplementary irrigation could help to mitigate increases in crop water requirements under warmer climate conditions and is most effective in drought prone basins and for drought-vulnerable crops. Overall, the results show that locally relevant agricultural policies are necessary to build Ethiopia’s food system resilience to climate and hydrological change by the mid-century.

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