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.

Q: What are the benefits of collecting women’s empowerment and nutrition data for the same individuals? Can we link data sources instead to conserve resources?

Helen Harris-Fry: You absolutely can link datasets, but that doesn’t mean you should. When you link datasets, you typically can only link them at the village level and observe the relationships between a village’s average nutrition outcomes and the average empowerment level for women in that village. If your objective is to look at how women use their power to affect health outcomes, there’s substantial variation in outcomes within villages, and around half of all inequality in health outcomes occurs within households. If we want to know the role women’s empowerment plays in nutrition, we need information linked at individual levels.

Q: What does it really take for a gender metric like WEMNS to gain political traction and be institutionalized in national statistical systems?

Madeleine Short Fabic: To gain the buy-in needed for WEMNS institutionalization in national statistical systems, we need to demonstrate how WEMNS data support decision-making, including how these data support national planning and meet local data needs. In addition to working with civil society, working directly with governmental organizations will help the advocacy process.

Susan Kaaria: We know that availability of sex-disaggregated data is essential for evidence-based program and policy development, but for that to happen, we need a plan to build buy-in. Firstly, a strong institutional anchor is important. Positioning WEMNS within relevant government organizations can help to ensure adoption. This needs to be accompanied by integration into existing data systems and alignment with ongoing surveys. Moreover, organizing local consultations with a variety of stakeholders can help raise awareness to support WEMNS adoption. For example, civil society organizations have a crucial role to play in promoting implementation of the metrics.       

Q: What are the most practical pathways for integrating WEMNS into existing large-scale survey architectures while limiting any increase to respondent or field burden?

Short Fabic: When it comes to incorporating WEMNS in existing surveys, there are two possible approaches. First, it may be added as a standalone module per country request. Alternatively, the WEMNS survey items may be woven into the core of an existing large-scale survey questionnaire. With this approach, implementers could potentially include WEMNS questions in place of similar survey content, thereby minimizing additional respondent and field burden. WEMNS training materials, tabulation plans, and standard indicators already exist, which will encourage use and dissemination.

Q: How would a concise and validated tool like WEMNS be helpful in future impact evaluations?

Harris-Fry: In terms of how we can use this tool in impact evaluations, I think there are two sides to consider. On one hand, WEMNS gives us something validated, which means we can be confident with the questions asked. If we all use different measures in our impact evaluations, answering that question is much more complicated, so having the same tool simplifies the analysis. On the other hand, impact evaluations have many things to measure in addition to women’s empowerment. We must be selective about what data we collect. We rarely have an intervention aiming to change all the dimensions measured in WEMNS. So, it may be wasteful to collect information on domains that we do not expect to change because of the intervention.

Q: What would it take to sustain and scale WEMNS and WEN? What are the biggest risks to data quality or cross‑country comparability, and how can those risks be mitigated?

Short Fabic: Given the length of the current WEMNS module, I recommend developing a short-form questionnaire to support widespread adoption, quality, and comparability. Additionally, I recommend that the WEMNS and WEN teams support data users in recognizing that surveys often have different sampling methodologies and survey populations, and this heterogeneity is likely to result in indicator estimates that may prove challenging to compare. For example, if two-point estimates are not similar, how does one determine whether there is an issue with quality or whether these differences would be expected based on the methodology? Going forward, WEMNS and WEN data users can collectively minimize such challenges and support scaling WEMNS and WEN by actively sharing their results and lessons learned.

Q: Scaling a tool like WEMNS requires not just technical skills, but leadership and institutional champions. What forms of capacity strengthening or incentives would make it more likely that countries take this on and sustain it?

Kaaria: I see four priority areas for supporting the implementation of WEMNS and creating incentives to sustain momentum at the country level. A first priority is to establish and train a core multi-stakeholder group of “agents of change.” This group should bring together individuals with an interest in gender data who can champion its importance within their institutions and help drive the adoption of WEMNS. Secondly, capacity strengthening should go beyond one-off trainings to a more structured approach. We should position WEMNS as part of core government data collection tools, and can facilitate its uptake through more intentional, routine trainings.

Next, partnerships will be crucial to scale up the use of the WEMNS. This should include collaboration with organizations that are committed to generating and using gender data, so they can help broaden adoption, strengthen ownership, and reinforce the tool’s relevance across institutions.

Finally, we need to identify opportunities to encourage WEMNS uptake. Linking the tool to national development priorities, reporting obligations such as the SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals] and CEDAW [Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women], or continental frameworks such as the CAADP [Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme] biennial review can help generate demand. Integrating WEMNS into donor-supported programs can also help offset implementation costs while demonstrating its practical value.

Ultimately, embedding gender data into decision-making systems is key to translating evidence into meaningful, inclusive policy action to advance improved nutrition outcomes. Collecting individual-level, integrated data on women’s empowerment and nutrition is critical for monitoring progress toward gender equality in nutrition outcomes, and the scale-up of the WEN framework and the WEMNS tool is one approach to doing so. As this work on these topics expands, streamlining such tools into more concise and practical forms is another means of building a robust body of evidence to contribute to the policy dialogue. Scaling and institutionalizing such frameworks and metrics, however, depends on strong country ownership, alignment with existing systems, and sustained capacity and partnerships.

Madeleine Short Fabic is Senior Strategy and Technical Advisor at ICF; Helen Harris-Fry is an Associate Professor of Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and co-director of the Global Health Economics Centre; Susan Kaaria is Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD). Emily Myers and Flor Paz are Senior Research Analysts with IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit. Opinions are the authors’.