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

Neha Kumar, Kalyani Raghunathan, Agnes Quisumbing, Samuel Scott, Purnima Menon, Giang Thai, Shivani Gupta and Carly Nichols

Food Policy, 2024, vol. 128, issue C

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Maternal nutrition; Nutrition sensitive agriculture; Women’s self-help groups; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919224001271
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:128:y:2024:i:c:s0306919224001271

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102716

Access Statistics for this article

Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd

More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().