Women’s Empowerment to Improve Nutritional Status in Children: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Women's empowerment considered vital in child nutrition and being considered important throughout the first 1000 days of life. Inadequate access to food and child feeding practices are the root causes of nutritional problems in children. Mothers play an essential role in parenting, particularly when it comes to child feeding. However, there are no systematic review available in regarding the correlation between women's empowerment and child nutrition. The aims of this study is to review the correlation between women's empowerment and nutritional status in children, more research should use a longitudinal study design to conduct pathway and lifecycle analysis in appropriate populations to clarify the relationship between women's empowerment and nutritional status in children.

We included English materials published between Science Direct, Pubmed, Research Gate and Google Scholar was used to find studies related to women's empowerment and children's nutritional status between 2016- 2021. 1025 studies were generated using tittle and abstract. We scanned the whole text of 538 of them, as well as 25 other research that the authors were aware of. Only 8 papers met our criteria for inclusion. Within three categories of empowerment, information was extracted and synthesized: resources, agency, and achievement. Accessing and distributing resources for household childcare is a challenge. Agency is a process of women's empowerment that includes mobility, decision-making, authority, motivation, skill, knowledge, and mother's role, all of which can help mothers improve their children's nutrition. The well-being of family members, nutritional status, and anthropometric rise as age progresses are all benefits of women's empowerment.

Women's empowerment was found to be connected with nutritional status WAZ, HAZ, WHZ, and child anthropometry in general, however the data were inconsistent. These inconsistencies were most likely caused by population features, situations, or methods/ conceptualizations of women's empowerment, as well as the specific domains researched. This study also found that different categories of women's empowerment may have varied relationships with child nutrition. Future study should focus on harmonizing definitions of women's empowerment, as well as determining which essential dimensions it should contain and how it should be quantified. In order to determine which policies and programs enhance women's empowerment and, as a result, foster child nutritional well-being, rigorous evaluation work is also required.