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Who we are

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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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

Development Strategies and Governance

Sudha Narayanan

Research Fellow

profile

Bio

Sudha Narayanan is a Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, based in the South Asia Office in New Delhi. Sudha’s research interests span agriculture, food and nutrition policy, and human development. She is particularly interested in survey-based research using microeconometric approaches to understand broader questions of agrarian change and state delivery systems for nutrition security. Her research focuses on contract farming, agrifood value chains, technology adoption in agriculture, public policies for food security and employment, and agriculture-nutrition linkages.

Sudha was previously an Associate Professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai. Prior to her PhD studies, she worked with the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, the Right to Food Campaign in India, and Cornell University, among others. She earned a PhD from Cornell University in Agricultural Economics. She also holds a dual master’s degree in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, India.

Development Strategies and Governance

Publications

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Adapting the Women’s empowerment in nutrition index: Lessons from Kenya

2025Lentz, E.; Jensen, Nathaniel D.; Lepariyo, Watson; Narayanan, S.; Bageant, E.
Details

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.

Year published

2025

Authors

Lentz, E.; Jensen, Nathaniel D.; Lepariyo, Watson; Narayanan, S.; Bageant, E.

Citation

Lentz, E., Jensen, N., Lepariyo, W., Narayanan, S. and Bageant, E. 2024. Adapting the women’s empowerment in nutrition index: Lessons from Kenya. World Development 188: 106887.

Country/Region

Kenya

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Nutrition; Women

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106887 Source record

Record type

Journal Article

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Adapting the Women’s empowerment in nutrition index: Lessons from Kenya

2025Lentz, Erin; Jensen, Nathan; Lepariyo, Watson; Narayanan, Sudha; Bageant, Elizabeth
Details

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.

Year published

2025

Authors

Lentz, Erin; Jensen, Nathan; Lepariyo, Watson; Narayanan, Sudha; Bageant, Elizabeth

Citation

Lentz, Erin; Jensen, Nathan; Lepariyo, Watson; Narayanan, Sudha; and Bageant, Elizabeth. 2024. Adapting the Women’s empowerment in nutrition index: Lessons from Kenya. World Development 188: 106887. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106887

Country/Region

Kenya

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Malnutrition; Food Security; Livelihoods; Food Systems; Indicators

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106887 Source record

Project

Livestock

Record type

Journal Article

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

How do women’s empowerment metrics measure up? A comparative analysis

2024Bageant, Elizabeth; Lentz, Erin; Narayanan, Sudha; Jensen, Nathaniel D.; Lepariyo, Watson
Details

How do women’s empowerment metrics measure up? A comparative analysis

Research has identified women’s empowerment as a critical factor for nutritional outcomes and a priority area for understanding women’s mental health status. At the same time, there is no consensus on how empowerment should be measured. The surrounding debate has produced several empowerment metrics that are widely used, yet we know little about whether they can be substituted for one another or their respective strengths and weaknesses. Using data collected from a single sample of women from rural, northern Kenya, we compare five empowerment metrics: The Project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and associated Health and Nutrition Module (HN), Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI), Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI), and the Survey Based Women’s Empowerment Index (SWPER). The metrics have shared theoretical origins and are commonly used in the food, nutrition and health spaces to study rural women’s lives across low- and middle-income countries. We examine the metrics’ characteristics, distributions, pairwise correlations and capacity of each metric to predict outcomes often associated with the concept of empowerment: body mass index (BMI) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). We find striking differences between these common empowerment metrics. The metrics’ correlations with one another are highly variable as are the predictive capacities for both outcomes. Further, our analysis finds that the choice of metric can dramatically influence which individuals are identified as empowered. In sum, our results suggest that while these metrics are used in remarkably similar ways to understand rural women’s empowerment and its consequences, unless they are computed with many identical survey questions, the metrics do not capture the same underlying concept and are not interchangeable. We recommend that our work be replicated elsewhere and caution should be taken when implementing and interpreting research using these metrics, as findings may be highly sensitive to the choice of metric.

Year published

2024

Authors

Bageant, Elizabeth; Lentz, Erin; Narayanan, Sudha; Jensen, Nathaniel D.; Lepariyo, Watson

Citation

Bageant, Elizabeth; Lentz, Erin; Narayanan, Sudha; Jensen, Nathan; and Lepariyo, Watson. 2024. How do women’s empowerment metrics measure up? A comparative analysis. Food Policy 129(November 2024): 102764. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102764

Country/Region

Kenya

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Nutrition; Mental Health; Women; Data

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102764 Source record

Project

Livestock

Record type

Journal Article

Blogs

Inspirational filmmaking to raise women’s voice and agency in the construction of assets for climate resilience in India
IFPRI Blog
 | 
December 26, 2023

Inspirational filmmaking to raise women’s voice and agency in the construction of assets for climate resilience in India

By Jordan Kyle, Katrina Kosec, Sudha Narayanan, and Kalyani Raghunathan

Compelling personal stories as a learning and motivational tool.

How India’s agrifood supply chains fared during the COVID-19 lockdown, from farm to fork
IFPRI Blog
 | 
July 20, 2020

How India’s agrifood supply chains fared during the COVID-19 lockdown, from farm to fork

By Sudha Narayanan

Food systems have proven more resilient than many expected, but vulnerable populations still need help.

Events

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

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 […]

2024 GFPR India Launch
Series/Special Event

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July 4, 2024, 10:00 – 5:20 pm

2024 GFPR India Launch

Unhealthy diets are a major driver of all forms of malnutrition, including undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity. At the same time, our food systems contribute about a third of greenhouse gas emissions and degrade natural resources. The 2024 Global Food Policy Report examines policies, innovations, and governance solutions to strengthen diet quality and […]

Delivering for Nutrition in South Asia: Transforming Diets
IFPRI Program/Country Event

 | 

November 9 to 10, 2022

Delivering for Nutrition in South Asia: Transforming Diets

Hybrid Event: November 9, 2022 – 4:30 PM to November 10, 2022 – 6:30 PM GMT. The purpose of this conference is to synthesize relevant evidence and stimulate dialogue to inform and guide policy and program initiatives in South Asia for improving equitable access to and consumption of healthy diets.

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News

April 17, 2023 | In the News

MGNREGA attendance app a govt ploy to discourage workers, contain expenses? (The Federal) 

The Federal (India) writes in a piece that “workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) are now required to mark attendance twice a day with onsite, geo-tagged photos through the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app.  Sudha Narayanan a researcher at IFPRI, has evaluated MGNREGA through studies and surveys since it […]

December 22, 2020 | In the News

MSP–The factoids vs. the facts (The Hindu)

The Hindu published an op-ed by Reteeka Khera, Senior Research Fellow Sudha Narayanan, and  Prankur Gupta on the purpose of the MSP and the debate on agricultural issues that must take into account the changed geography of procurement and the seller’s profile. 

December 15, 2020 | In the News

MSP–The factoids vs. the facts (The Hindu)

The Hindu published an op-ed by Reteeka Khera, Senior Research Fellow Sudha Rayanan, and  Prankur Gupta on the purpose of the MSP and the debate on agricultural issues that must take into account the changed geography of procurement and the seller’s profile.

View all News