Women's Empowerment And Food Security Nexus

A rich body of literature exists for explaining the role women play in ensuring their household's food security;however,as far as their own food security,health status or household food insecurity is concerned,little attention has been given especially in rural areas of AJK(Azad Jammu Kashmir),Pakistan.Therefore,this research collects evidence on the relationship between the desired variables in the rural areas of AJK.Data were collected from the households of 600 rural women.The results in context of her own food security provide insights that the domains of legal rights,information and communication technologies(ICTs),social support and familial rights,can be a significant pathway for enhancing the food security of women as more bargaining power of women over the utilization of resources could result in a good quality of food choices and more expense on food items due to these rights.But,understanding food insecurity also requires considering gender norms as in this study,the infrastructural facilities and sense of land entitlement provide unexpected non-significant results.Though women help in the mounting necessities of their families,they are unable to enhance the food requirements for themselves due to restricted mobility and less economic opportunities.This is mainly due to the poor infrastructure,and more importantly,the lack of access to resources,especially land,because of lack of knowledge and self-confidence.Hence,by understanding the household makeup from women's perspectives and customs,the findings from this study can help and guide policymakers in developing more appropriate strategies to improve the food security of women.Further,a structural equation model partial least square(PLS-SEM)is used to analyse the index-based agricultural rights known as WEAI(Women's empowerment in agriculture index)to enlighten its complex pathways with household's food security.The outcomes propose that rights of women in the leadership domain,agricultural production domain,resource ownership and time domain have significant negative effects on food insecurity i.e.women can improve the vulnerability of their households by having access to these rights.Surprisingly,the outcome found that women's empowerment in the income domain provides significant but positive results i.e.generally increase food insecurity of their house.Again,the reasons could be that non-economic mechanisms such as patriarchal customs may prevent women from controlling their household income.For instance when women earnmoney,the household gender dynamics may be disrupted,and this can lead to gendered violence.So as a consequence,it is likely that women spend less money on nourishing foods.Besides,women's health status is also explored using the same index as it is mentioned in literature that women play role in ensuring the household's food security and health status,however as far her own health status is concerned little attention has been given.So the OLS regression analysis is used to explore the relationship between women's empowerment in agriculture index and their health status in terms of BMI(Body Mass Index).The empirical analysis showed that women's autonomy in credit and income utilization are negatively associated with women's BMI i.e.probability of reducing malnutrition in the sample.Besides women's empowerment dimensions,other individual and household characteristics are also more important determinants of women's health status.These results suggest that expanding women's empowerment along with other necessary household characteristics are expected to supplement health interventions for women to reduce malnutrition especially in AJK Pakistan which results in making advancement for many other societal and development goals.