Empowerment and nutrition in Niger: insights from the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition grid

Niger, one of the most impoverished countries in the world, has fared consistently poorly on a range of human development indicators, including women’s nutritional status. A combination of nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive interventions that also address women’s empowerment is essential to address nutritional goals, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Yet, there is not much clarity on what sectors policy makers should target. To identify the aspects of women’s empowerment that are associated with nutritional outcomes in Niger, we present a novel application of a regression decomposition technique, the Shapley-Owen decomposition. After categorizing the drivers of undernutrition into a series of domains (food, health, fertility and institutions) and dimensions (knowledge, resources, and agency), we predict women’s body mass index and anemia status based on these domain-dimensions and other controls using Demographic and Health Survey data. We find that access to health resources and fertility resources play a substantial role in women’s nutritional outcomes in Niger. By identifying the relative contribution of each domain-dimension, our approach offers a unique insight into what sectors are most closely related to the nutritional status of Nigerien women and can aid in identifying interventions that both empower women and improve nutritional wellbeing.