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Intrahousehold power inequalities and cooperation: Unpacking household responses to nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions in rural India

Harris-Fry, Helen; Prost, Audrey; Beaumont, Emma; Fivian, Emily; Mohanty, Satyanarayan; Parida, Manoj; Pradhan, Ronali; ... Kadiyala, Suneetha; + view all (2023) Intrahousehold power inequalities and cooperation: Unpacking household responses to nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions in rural India. Maternal and Child Nutrition , Article e13503. 10.1111/mcn.13503. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) interventions offer a means to improve the dietary quality of rural, undernourished populations. Their effectiveness could be further increased by understanding how household dynamics enable or inhibit the uptake of NSA behaviours. We used a convergent parallel mixed-methods design to describe the links between household dynamics-specifically intrahousehold power inequalities and intrahousehold cooperation-and dietary quality and to explore whether household dynamics mediated or modified the effects of NSA interventions tested in a cluster-randomized trial, Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition (UPAVAN). We use quantitative data from cross-sectional surveys in 148 village clusters at UPAVAN's baseline and 32 months afterwards (endline), and qualitative data from family case studies and focus group discussions with intervention participants and facilitators. We found that households cooperated to grow and buy nutritious foods, and gendered power inequalities were associated with women's dietary quality, but cooperation and women's use of power was inhibited by several interlinked factors. UPAVAN interventions were more successful in more supportive, cooperative households, and in some cases, the interventions increased women's decision-making power. However, women's decisions to enter into negotiations with family members depended on whether women deemed the practices promoted by UPAVAN interventions to be feasible, as well as women's confidence and previous cultivation success. We conclude that interventions may be more effective if they can elicit cooperation from the whole household. This will require a move towards more family-centric intervention models that empower women while involving other family members and accounting for the varied ways that families cooperate and negotiate.

Type: Article
Title: Intrahousehold power inequalities and cooperation: Unpacking household responses to nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions in rural India
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/mcn.13503
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13503
Language: English
Additional information: © 2023 The Authors. Maternal & Child Nutrition published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: India, cooperation, diets, household behaviour, mixed methods, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, power
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute for Global Health
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10167367
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