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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.

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researcher spotlight

Samuel Benin

Samuel Benin is the Acting Director for Africa in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit. He conducts research on national strategies and public investment for accelerating food systems transformation in Africa and provides analytical support to the African Union’s CAADP Biennial Review.

Where we work

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Where we work

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

Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion

Kalyani Raghunathan

Research Fellow

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Bio

Kalyani Raghunathan is a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She completed her Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University in 2015 under the supervision of Dr. Gary Fields. Her areas of interest are development and labor economics, with specific focus on rural India, and her dissertation largely focused on evaluations of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). She continues to be interested in social protection programs, but now more from the lens of improving health and nutrition outcomes. Her other work spans a range of topics and methods, including two evaluations of women’s self-help groups and the role they play in improving rural agriculture and livelihoods, nutrition, and women’s empowerment; an evaluation of a large social protection program in Bangladesh aimed at improving maternal and child health; and secondary data work on the affordability of nutritious diets in South Asia.

Publications

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Publications

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Book Chapter

Diet affordability: Understanding the high cost of healthy diets

2024Headey, Derek D.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Alderman, Harold; de Pee, Saskia; Raghunathan, Kalyani
Details

Diet affordability: Understanding the high cost of healthy diets

As new metrics of healthy diet affordability have been developed in the past five years, it is estimated that between 2 and 3 billion people worldwide — mostly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) — cannot afford a healthy diet. The implications for human nutrition are striking: affordability is a binding constraint to achieving a healthy diet in the world’s poorest countries. This chapter poses several questions to initiate strategic thinking on possible responses to this challenge and recommends actions to support shifts toward healthy diets in LMICs.

Year published

2024

Authors

Headey, Derek D.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Alderman, Harold; de Pee, Saskia; Raghunathan, Kalyani

Citation

Headey, Derek D.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Alderman, Harold; de Pee, Saskia; and Raghunathan, Kalyani. 2024. Diet affordability: Understanding the high cost of healthy diets. In Global food policy report 2024: Food systems for healthy diets and nutrition. Chapter 4, Pp. 36-45. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/141885

Keywords

Food Prices; Food Affordability; Healthy Diets; Poverty

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Book Chapter

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Working Paper

Claim-making under India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA): Barriers and opportunities for women’s voice and agency over asset selection

2024Kosec, Katrina; Kyle, Jordan; Narayanan, Sudha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Ray, Soumyajit
Details

Claim-making under India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA): Barriers and opportunities for women’s voice and agency over asset selection

This paper examines the dynamics of women’s claim-making within the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme in India, focusing on their participation in selecting durable assets for climate resilience. Despite legal entitlements and protections for women within the program, gender disparities persist in claiming public resources. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach including surveys and qualitative interviews, the study uncovers various pathways to women’s claim-making, influenced by factors such as gender norms around mobility and women’s voice and agency, internal barriers and constraints including comfort in public speaking, and knowledge of the program and its various procedures for selecting assets. While challenges to women’s effective participation remain, findings from our analysis suggest potential for interventions to reduce gender gaps and enhance inclusivity in planning processes. Moreover, the study underscores the importance of recognizing diverse claim-making pathways to promote inclusion effectively within the program.

Year published

2024

Authors

Kosec, Katrina; Kyle, Jordan; Narayanan, Sudha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Ray, Soumyajit

Citation

Kosec, Katrina; Kyle, Jordan; Narayanan, Sudha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; and Ray, Soumyajit. 2024. Claim-making under India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA): Barriers and opportunities for women’s voice and agency over asset selection. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2247. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Climate Resilience; Gender Equality; Infrastructure; Women’s Empowerment; Employment; Women’s Participation; Gender Norms; Governance

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Working Paper

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Brief

What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

2024Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani
Details

What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)-related challenges around the world can negatively affect communities and individuals, but people in resource-constrained areas face additional obstacles in preventing and recovering from the consequences of inadequate WASH infrastructure. WASH interventions in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) often target women as key actors for achieving project outcomes and many aim to improve the quality of women’s lives; fewer, however, have a specific focus on empowering women. A systematic review concluded that studies within the WASH sector have rarely focused specifically on empowering women, despite efforts to reach and benefit them (Caruso et al. 2022). In a review of gender-sensitive WASH indicators that have been used in the peer-reviewed literature, gray literature, and toolkits from organizations operating in WASH, only around 10% of the 162 indicators identified specifically measured empowerment. Given the limitations of previous approaches to measuring WASH-related empowerment, we recently developed a Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH), a suite of indicators to measure women’s and men’s agency in the WASH sector, based on data collected in Malawi and Nepal. This project note first provides some context for the Malawi study, then describes our overall approach to developing the WE-WASH indicators and summarizes the implementation of the WE-WASH question naire, and then presents some key findings emerging from Malawi.

Year published

2024

Authors

Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; Raghunathan, Kalyani

Citation

Ramani, Gayathri; Faas, Simone; Chiwasa, Febbie; Chilalika, Joan; Kamwamba-Mtethiwa, Jean; Heckert, Jessica; and Raghunathan, Kalyani. 2024. What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH). IFPRI Project Note January 2024. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://hdl.handle.net/10568/138288

Country/Region

Malawi

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Southern Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Water; Hygiene; Infrastructure; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

Events

From Research to Impact: Towards just and Resilient Agri-food Systems
IFPRI Program/Country Event

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October 9 to 12, 2023

From Research to Impact: Towards just and Resilient Agri-food Systems

Conference: October 09, 2023 – 9:00 AM to October 12, 2023 – 6:00 PM IST. IFPRI is participating in the 2023 annual CGIAR gender research conference will take place in New Delhi, India.

31st International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE)
IFPRI at External Event

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August 17 to 31, 2021

31st International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE)

Virtual Event: AUG 17, 2021 – 08:00 AM to AUG 31, 2021 08:00 PM EDT. IFPRI is participating in the 31st Conference of Agriculture Economists organized by the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE). 

Transforming Food Systems After COVID-19: South Asia Discussion of IFPRI’s 2021 Global Food Policy Report
Series/Special Event

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July 8, 2021, 7:00 – 8:30 am

Transforming Food Systems After COVID-19: South Asia Discussion of IFPRI’s 2021 Global Food Policy Report

Virtual Event: July 8, 2021 – 7:00 AM to 8:30 AM EDT. IFPRI South Asia will deliberate the challenges that the pandemic has highlighted on the vulnerabilities that the region must tackle to ensure a better food system for future generations. 

News

November 09, 2022 | In the News

India’s double-edged nutrition problem (Code Blue) 

IFPRI’s research fellows Kalyani Raghunathan and Derek Headey, in an op-ed in Code Blue (Malaysia), focus on India’s problem of malnutrition, which includes under- and over-nutrition simultaneously. The authors discuss both the implications and policy recommendations to improve access to affordable healthy diets in the country. “Diet quality, already alarmingly bad, is only likely to have deteriorated in […]

October 21, 2020 | In the News

After Abysmal Hunger Index Rank, Paper Points Out 3 of 4 Rural Indians Can’t Afford Nutritious Diet (The Wire) 

The Wire (India) published an article on the results of the Global Hunger Index (GHI). According to GHI, India ranks 94 out of 107 nations and falls in the “serious” hunger category. Along with these results, IFPRI has published a Food Policy journal article titled Affordability of nutritious diets in rural India. Research Fellow Kalyani Raghunathan and Senior Research Fellow Derek Headey, with senior […]

October 14, 2020 | In the News

60 percent of rural India can’t afford nutritious diets (Hindustan Times)

Hindustan Times published an article focusing on a paper by Research Fellow Kalyani Raghunathan that states the cost of a recommended diet (CoRD) in India in 2011 (the most recent year for which expenditure and consumption data is available) was ₹45.1 and ₹51.3 for women and men, numbers that were almost 1.6 times the commonly used World Bank poverty line […]