In 2023, 735 million individuals worldwide experienced hunger, and 258 million people across  58 countries and territories faced acute food insecurity at crisis or worse levels. With 60% of them comprising women, the gender gap in food insecurity continues to widen. The evidence on the nexus between food systems and nutrition (FSN) and women's empowerment has been rapidly growing – with the last decade accounting for 94% of the published studies. However, the existing analyses focus on the effects of women's empowerment interventions on food security outcomes and not the converse. To complement and build on this work, our forthcoming synthesis looks at the effects of FSN interventions on women’s empowerment outcomes.

Understanding the gender differential

This higher vulnerability to food insecurity is partly caused by gender inequalities and restrictive gender norms assigning women and men different responsibilities and opportunities in food systems. Women face barriers to achieving food security and nutrition for themselves, participate in food-related decision-making, or have access to economic opportunities.

Food security and gender equality are connected by the ability of women to allocate their income for both food and non-food expenses, their capacity to care for themselves and their families, and the energy expended by women in various roles and responsibilities. Therefore, by transforming the food systems towards higher levels of gender equality, FSN interventions have the potential to contribute to women's empowerment.

Reviewing the evidence base

Our rapid evidence assessment builds on the body of evidence covered by 3ie's living FSN evidence and gap map (E&GM), which includes 2,338 impact evaluations (IE) and 199 systematic reviews (SR). The E&GM analyzes the effect of FSN interventions in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs) and has been updated six times (those updates are discussed in blog posts here, here, here, here, here, and here).

As per its latest update in November 2023, the map includes 101 studies analyzing the evidence of FSN interventions on women's empowerment outcomes: 96 impact evaluations (IEs) and five systematic reviews (SRs). Among the IEs, we observe a prevalence of experimental design as they represent 60% of the body of evidence.

The evidence covers 41 countries, a majority of them being in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Interventions belong to three main categories: 60 focus on the food value chain, 28 on consumer behavior, and 55 on the food environment.

The analysis of the body of evidence highlights some gaps, notably in the reporting of costs, ethics, funding sources, or on some intervention categories and outcomes such as self-esteem, food loss and waste management, promotion and labeling, or processing and packaging.

The gap in high-confidence synthesis evidence on the effect of FSN interventions on women’s empowerment outcomes forms the basis of our rapid evidence assessment (REA). This REA aims to complement the analysis of 3ie's recent REA focusing on the effects of women’s empowerment interventions on food security outcomes where we observed women's empowerment interventions' positive and statistically significant effects on nutrition-related outcomes, including food security, affordability, availability, and diet quality and adequacy.

Our rapid evidence assessment and next steps

This REA allows us to take some shortcuts to the traditional systematic review methodology to provide rapid evidence on the effectiveness of an intervention (read protocol here). Our REA will primarily focus on strategic interventions where enough evidence is available for our analysis. We will exclude studies focusing on women's empowerment interventions (since they are already covered in our previous REA: Berretta et al. 2023), ongoing studies, and studies on interventions measuring women's empowerment effects, which are covered by less than six studies in the existing FSN E&GM (as these will be areas where we will not be able to draw strong conclusions). This process will reduce the overall body of evidence included in the REA from 101 to 60 studies.

As we extract and analyze data from the studies, we would appreciate your suggestions on studies, focus, scope, or any additional insights from the FSN and women’s empowerment sectors. You can also write to info@3ieimpact.org if you want to join our REA project advisory group or a mailing list to receive the preliminary findings and updates from this project.