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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Lina Alaaeldin Abdelfattah

Lina Alaaeldin Abdelfattah is a Senior Research Associate in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, based in Cairo. Her research interests include applied economic development, trade, and spatial economics, with a focus on topics relevant to social protection, food, nutrition, and agriculture in the Middle East and Africa. 

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experts

Nutrition, Diets, and Health

Neha Kumar

Senior Research Fellow

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Bio

Neha Kumar is a Senior Research Fellow in the Nutrition, Diets, and Health Unit at IFPRI. Neha is an economist by training and has an accumulated expertise that spans the diverse sectors of agriculture, social protection, gender, and nutrition-focused programs. Since joining IFPRI, she has been involved in several complex and multidimensional impact evaluations, including social protection programs like the Productive Safety Net Program in Ethiopia, agriculture-nutrition interventions such as the HarvestPlus-funded biofortified Orange Sweet Potato program in Uganda and Mozambique and the Improved Vegetables and Fish Technology Intervention in Bangladesh. She has expertise and substantial experience with using state-of-the-art econometric techniques for impact evaluation. Neha holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University.

Languages spoken: English, Hindi

Publications

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Publications

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Journal Article

Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help?

2024Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Scott, Samuel P.; Menon, Purnima; Thai, Giang; Gupta, Shivani; Nichols, Carly; WINGS study team
Details

Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help?

Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs’ women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition intervention delivered through women’s SHGs in five states in central and eastern India. The interventions involved the delivery of nutrition behavior change communication to groups through participatory approaches, community engagement around key issues, and the strengthening of collective organizations. Our analysis is based on three rounds of rich panel data on close to 2700 rural women and their households from eight districts in these five states and qualitative work from an accompanying process evaluation. Using difference-in-difference models with nearest neighbor matching methods, we present results on women’s anthropometry and diet-related outcomes. We do not observe any improvements in women’s BMI or overall dietary diversity. Although more women in the nutrition intensification arm consumed animal source foods, nuts and seeds, and fruits, this was not enough to increase overall dietary diversity scores or the proportion of women achieving minimum dietary diversity. We measure intermediate outcomes along the program’s impact pathways and find improvements in household incomes, cultivation of home gardens, and utilization of government schemes but not in women’s empowerment. The lack of improvement in anthropometry and diets despite changes in some intermediate outcomes can be attributed to several factors such as low implementation intensity, poor facilitator capacity and incentives, the lack of relevance of the BCC topics to the average SHG member, and resource and agency constraints to adoption of recommended practices. Although we do not have data to test the parallel trends assumption and so do not interpret our results as causal, these findings do suggest that optimism about using group-based platforms needs to be tempered in resource-poor contexts.

Year published

2024

Authors

Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Scott, Samuel P.; Menon, Purnima; Thai, Giang; Gupta, Shivani; Nichols, Carly; WINGS study team

Citation

Kumar, Neha; Raghunathan, Kalyani; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Scott, Samuel P.; Menon, Purnima; Thai, Giang; Gupta, Shivani; Nichols, Carly; and WINGS study team. 2024. Women improving nutrition through self-help groups in India: Does nutrition information help? Food Policy 128(October 2024): 102716. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102716

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agriculture; Body Mass Index; Maternal Nutrition; Self-help Groups; Women; Nutrition Education

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102716 Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Journal Article

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Journal Article

Individual interventions, collective lessons: Developing mid-range theory on women’s groups to improve health

2024Desai, Sapna; Kumar, Neha; Gram, Lu; Hazra, Avishek; Sanyal, Kaliat Ammu; Sivaram, Sharmada
Details

Individual interventions, collective lessons: Developing mid-range theory on women’s groups to improve health

Background Interventions with women’s groups have been widely implemented to improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income settings, particularly India. While there is a large evidence base on the effectiveness of single interventions, it is challenging to predict whether a women’s group intervention delivered in one setting can be expected to work in another. Methods We applied realist principles to develop and refine a mid-range theory on the effectiveness of women’s groups interventions, summarised key lessons for implementation, and reflected on the process. We synthesised primary data from several interventions in India, a systematic review, and an analysis of behaviour change techniques. We developed mid-range theories across three areas: maternal and newborn health, nutrition, and violence against women, as well as an overarching mid-range theory on how women’s groups can improve health. Results Our overarching mid-range theory suggested that effective interventions should: build group or community capabilities; focus on health outcomes relevant to group members; and approach health issues modifiable through women’s individual or collective actions. We identified four key lessons for future interventions with women’s groups, including the importance of skilled and remunerated facilitation, sufficient intensity, supply-side strengthening, and the need to adapt delivery during scale up while maintaining fidelity to intervention theory. Conclusions Our experience demonstrated the feasibility of developing mid-range theory from a combination of evidence and insights from practice. It also underscored the importance of community engagement and ongoing research to ‘thicken’ mid-range theories to design effective and scalable women’s groups interventions in India and similar settings.

Year published

2024

Authors

Desai, Sapna; Kumar, Neha; Gram, Lu; Hazra, Avishek; Sanyal, Kaliat Ammu; Sivaram, Sharmada

Citation

Desai, Sapna; Kumar, Neha; Gram, Lu; Hazra, Avishek; Sanyal, Kaliat Ammu; Sivaram, Sharmada et al. 2024.Individual interventions, collective lessons: Developing mid-range theory on women’s groups to improve health. Journal of Global Health 14. https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.14.04152

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Women; Health; Low Income Groups; Behaviour; Nutrition; Maternal and Child Health; Violence

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.14.04152 Source record

Record type

Journal Article

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Working Paper

Social protection and gender: policy, practice and research

2024Hidrobo, Melissa; Peterman, Amber; Kumar, Neha; Lambon-Quayefio, Monica; Roy, Shalini; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Paz, Flor
Details

Social protection and gender: policy, practice and research

Gender considerations in the design and delivery of social protection programs are critical to meet overall objectives of reducing poverty and vulnerability. We provide an overview of the policy discourse and research on social protection and gender in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on social assistance, social care, and social insurance. Taking a ‘review of reviews’ approach, we aggregate findings from rigorous evaluations on women’s health, economic, empowerment, and violence impacts. We show there is robust evidence that social assistance has beneficial effects across all four domains. In addition, there is emerging evidence that social care has positive impacts on women’s economic outcomes, but scarce evidence of its impacts on other domains. Aggregated evidence on the impacts of social insurance are lacking. Key design elements facilitating positive impacts for women relate to gender targeting; quality complementary programming; replacing conditionalities with soft nudges; ensuring the value, frequency, and duration of benefits are sufficient; and gender-sensitive operational components. We close with a discussion of evidence gaps and priorities for future research.

Year published

2024

Authors

Hidrobo, Melissa; Peterman, Amber; Kumar, Neha; Lambon-Quayefio, Monica; Roy, Shalini; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Paz, Flor

Citation

Hidrobo, Melissa; Peterman, Amber; Kumar, Neha; Lambon-Quayefio, Monica; Roy, Shalini; Gilligan, Daniel O.; and Paz, Flor. 2024. Social protection and gender: policy, practice and research. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2257. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/144240

Keywords

Gender; Poverty; Social Protection; Vulnerability; Women’s Empowerment

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Working Paper

Blogs

Why gender-sensitive social protection is critical to the COVID-19 response in low- and middle-income countries
IFPRI Blog
 | 
April 28, 2020

Why gender-sensitive social protection is critical to the COVID-19 response in low- and middle-income countries

By Melissa Hidrobo, Neha Kumar, Tia Palermo, Amber Peterman, and Shalini Roy

Governments ramping up pandemic assistance programs must take care to see they don't widen inequalities. 

Why gender matters in COVID-19 responses – now and in the future
IFPRI Blog
 | 
April 22, 2020

Why gender matters in COVID-19 responses – now and in the future

By Agnes Quisumbing, Neha Kumar, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Claudia Ringler

In low- and middle-income countries, women are key to practical efforts to limit the spread of coronavirus—but face many obstacles men do not.

International Women's Day: Self-help groups aid communication, empowerment in India
IFPRI Blog
 | 
March 08, 2018

International Women’s Day: Self-help groups aid communication, empowerment in India

By Neha Kumar, Kalyani Raghunathan, and Agnes Quisumbing

How rural women activists are bringing about change from the ground up.

Events

Delivering for Nutrition in South Asia: Connecting the Dots Across Systems
IFPRI Program/Country Event

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December 3 to 5, 2024

Delivering for Nutrition in South Asia: Connecting the Dots Across Systems

South Asia grapples with escalating levels of malnutrition in various forms, including undernutrition, overweight and obesity, and micronutrient deficiencies, alongside increasing incidence of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Malnutrition results from a complex interplay of factors incorporating household and individual decision-making, agriculture and food systems, healthcare services, education, and socio-ecological systems that determine access to services and […]

South Asia Launch | Nepal | 2024 Global Food Policy Report: Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Nutrition
Series/Special Event

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August 8 to 9, 2024

South Asia Launch | Nepal | 2024 Global Food Policy Report: Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Nutrition

Despite significant progress in addressing hunger and undernutrition in the early 2000s, malnutrition, in all its forms, remains a major challenge in all regions of the world. Unhealthy diets remain the primary drivers of many forms of malnutrition, including undernutrition, overweight and obesity, micronutrient deficiencies, and diet- related noncommunicable diseases. Today, the number of people […]

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists
IFPRI at External Event

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August 2 to 7, 2024

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists

The triennial International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE-2024), centred on the theme “Transformation Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems” is scheduled from August 2-7, 2024, in New Delhi, India. The conference offers a distinctive platform, providing a golden opportunity for the agricultural academic institutions and researchers to convene in person, exchange knowledge, and actively contribute to the […]