Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help?
研究评估了印度妇女自助小组实施的农业营养干预对妇女营养状况的影响，发现虽未改善BMI或膳食多样性，但增加了营养食品消费，并在收入、家庭菜园和政府计划利用方面有所提升。
• India continues to contribute greatly to the global prevalence of undernutrition. • Women’s self-help groups (SHGs)- an important platform for reaching women in India. • Evidence on effectiveness of SHG-based interventions on nutrition remains limited. • Effectiveness of an agriculture-nutrition intervention delivered by women’s SHGs. • Analysis based on three rounds of panel data on about 2500 rural women. • No impact on women’s BMI or diet diversity, but they consumed more nutritious foods. • Find improvements along several impact pathways – income, agriculture and rights. 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.