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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

Kalyani Raghunathan

Kalyani Raghunathan is Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, based in New Delhi, India. Her research lies at the intersection of agriculture, gender, social protection, and public health and nutrition, with a specific focus on South Asia and Africa. 

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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Projects

Women Improving Nutrition through Group-based Strategies (WINGS) is a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded umbrella project in India to be carried out in 2015-2019. WINGS aims to build the evidence base on the pathways through which Self Help Groups (SHGs) can improve nutrition in India.  It will conduct a comprehensive literature review, consolidate methods and metrics, and evaluate the impact of PRADAN’s nutrition-intensification intervention activities. 

The evaluation consists of quantitative panel surveys and process evaluation studies, several experimental studies, and a cost-effectiveness analysis of PRADAN’s SHG models. Specifically, the evaluation will investigate the impact of PRADAN’s nutrition-intensification intervention activities on the nutritional status of women, how participation in PRADAN’s nutrition-intensification activities affect women’s empowerment, and how women’s empowerment mediates impacts on the nutritional status of women, as well as on the diet quality and nutritional status of children under two. WINGS will also develop a learning network on agriculture-nutrition-gender linkages in order to increase interaction and exchange of information among implementers, researchers, donors, and other stakeholders in South Asia. 

Project duration: 2015 – 2021

Contact

Neha Kumar

Donors and funders

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) led by IFPRI

Project partners

PRADAN

Oxford Policy Management

Publications

Resource thumbnail

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

Resource thumbnail

Working Paper

A multi-country validation and sensitivity analysis of the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI)

2023Seymour, Greg; Faas, Simone; Ferguson, Nathaniel; Heckert, Jessica; Malapit, Hazel J.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; van Biljon, Chloe; Gender Agriculture Assets Project Phase 2 Study Team
Details

A multi-country validation and sensitivity analysis of the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI)

We discuss the evolution of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) from its initial launch in 2018 until early 2023. We explain the reasons motivating changes to the composition of pro-WEAI and the adequacy thresholds of several indicators and discuss the implications of both for the overall measurement of project impacts on women’s empowerment. We present supporting empirical results comparing projects’ impacts calculated using the abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) (the predecessor to pro-WEAI with fewer indicators and less stringent indicator cut-offs), the pilot 12-indicator version of pro-WEAI, and the final, revised 10-indicator version of pro-WEAI, based on longitudinal data from six agricultural development projects in East and West Africa and South Asia as part of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2). In addition, we assess the sensitivity of the revised pro-WEAI to an alternative weighting scheme, namely inverse covariance weighting (ICW). Overall, we find that the revised pro-WEAI performs well: In comparison to A-WEAI, pro-WEAI—regardless of version—identifies larger and more frequently significant impact estimates, indicating that pro-WEAI is more sensitive to detecting project impacts on women’s empowerment than A-WEAI. And we find only minor differences in impact estimates produced using the 12-indicator, 10-indicator, or alternate weighting scheme versions of pro-WEAI. We conclude with reflections on six years of work on pro-WEAI during GAAP2.

Year published

2023

Authors

Seymour, Greg; Faas, Simone; Ferguson, Nathaniel; Heckert, Jessica; Malapit, Hazel J.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S.; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; van Biljon, Chloe; Gender Agriculture Assets Project Phase 2 Study Team

Citation

Seymour, Greg; Faas, Simone; Ferguson, Nathaniel; Heckert, Jessica; Malapit, Hazel J.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; van Biljon, Chloe; and Gender Agriculture Assets Project Phase 2 Study Team. 2023. A multi-country validation and sensitivity analysis of the project level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (Pro-WEAI). IFPRI Discussion Paper 2201. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136974

Keywords

Southern Asia; Western Africa; Eastern Africa; Asia; Africa; Women’s Empowerment; Gender Equality; Gender; Agricultural Development; Impact Assessment

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136974 Source record

Project

Policies, Institutions, and Markets

Record type

Working Paper

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Ethnicity, information and cooperation: Evidence from a group-based nutrition intervention

2023Raghunathan, Kalyani; Alvi, Muzna; Sehgal, Mrignyani
Details

Ethnicity, information and cooperation: Evidence from a group-based nutrition intervention

Development programs often rely on locally hired agents for service delivery, especially for interventions promoting agricultural practices, health, and nutrition. These agents are key to reaching underserved communities, especially women, with information and services around recommended practices. However, where societies are socially stratified, differences in ethnic identities between agents and beneficiaries may impact the effectiveness of information and service delivery and the uptake of recommended behaviors. We explore the salience of shared ethnic identity between agents and beneficiaries in promoting collective action using a field experiment with women’s self-help groups (SHGs) in India. We cross-randomize an information treatment and a group-agent shared ethnicity treatment at the SHG level. We measure impacts on individual group member information retention and willingness to contribute to a group-owned kitchen garden that could improve access to a diverse and nutritious diet. We find information retention is better when the group is matched with an agent lower in the ethnic hierarchy, but that agents higher in the hierarchy elicit greater individual contributions to the group-owned kitchen garden. We suggest some hypotheses for these seemingly contradictory results. Other characteristics like education, group cohesion and perceived agent ability also matter in changing knowledge and contribution. Our findings have important implications for effective program design and implementation, suggesting that implementers need to consider factors beyond the information content, target group and pedagogical mode of delivery for their strategies to be transformative.

Year published

2023

Authors

Raghunathan, Kalyani; Alvi, Muzna; Sehgal, Mrignyani

Citation

Raghunathan, Kalyani; Alvi, Muzna Fatima; and Sehgal, Mrignyani. 2023. Ethnicity, information and cooperation: Evidence from a group-based nutrition intervention. Food Policy 120(October 2023): 102478. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102478

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Southern Asia; Asia; Health; Services; Agriculture; Nutrition; Self-help Groups; Development Programmes; Ethnic Groups; Domestic Gardens; Information; Behaviour; Diet; Women

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102478 Source record

Project

Agriculture for Nutrition and Health

Record type

Journal Article

Blogs

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.

Improving Nutrition in India: Taking Flight with WINGS
Agriculture for Nutrition and Health
 | 
March 25, 2016

Improving Nutrition in India: Taking Flight with WINGS

By Kimberly Keeton

All over the world, people are paying attention to the transformative role of women’s groups. Women, when organized in groups, have been able to achieve change within their communities, households, and themselves.

Donors

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) led by IFPRI

Team members

Neha Kumar

Neha Kumar

Senior Research Fellow, Nutrition,
Diets, and Health

Neha Kumar

Neha Kumar

Senior Research Fellow, Nutrition,
Diets, and Health

Purnima Menon

Purnima Menon

Senior Director, Food and Nutrition Policy, CGIAR and IFPRI, Markets,
Trade, and Institutions, Nutrition, Diets, and Health, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion

Other

Topics/Countries