What it takes to integrate women’s empowerment and nutrition in survey monitoring and policy at scale
Women play a central role in food systems, yet persistent gender inequalities continue to constrain their agency, decision-making power, and access to productive and nutritional resources, undermining both nutrition outcomes and broader development goals.
- surveys
- women's empowerment
- nutrition
By Madeleine Short Fabic, Helen Harris-Fry, Susan Kaaria, Flor Paz, and Emily MyersJuly 28, 2026
Key takeaways
- Integrated data gives deeper insights. Collecting empowerment and nutrition data from the same individuals better reveals how women’s agency affects nutrition outcomes.
- Scaling requires more than good metrics. Government buy-in, strong institutional support, and stakeholder engagement are essential for lasting adoption.
- Simple, practical tools encourage use. Shorter survey modules and integration into existing surveys can reduce burden while improving monitoring and policy impact.
Women play a central role in food systems, yet persistent gender inequalities continue to constrain their agency, decision-making power, and access to productive and nutritional resources, undermining both nutrition outcomes and broader development goals. A growing body of evidence shows that women’s empowerment is not only a matter of rights but also a critical driver of household nutrition, dietary diversity, and resilience across agrifood systems.
The Women’s Empowerment and Nutrition (WEN) framework was developed to help monitor progress on these intertwined goals. WEN draws on the IFPRI tool WEMNS (Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Surveys) and functions as a strategic measurement framework that generates policy-relevant evidence by integrating women’s empowerment metrics with nutrition outcomes in national surveys.
On March 10, IFPRI and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hosted an event, “Integrating women’s empowerment and nutrition in national surveys—What it takes to scale WEMNS,” bringing together experts experienced in implementing survey tools in different contexts. Drawing on recent experience in the field, the event highlighted the potential for these tools to provide insights for policy formulation, program design, and monitoring—demonstrating both the relevance of combining nutrition and empowerment outcomes and the usefulness of WEMNS across different contexts.
The three of us (Madeleine Short Fabic, Helen Harris-Fry, and Susan Kaaria) were happy to contribute to the panel’s Q-and-A moderated by IFPRI’s Hazel Malapit, who posed questions about the WEN approach and how to scale it for impact. Below, we summarize the key points of the discussion.