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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.

Ahmed Akhter

researcher spotlight

Akhter Ahmed

Akhter Ahmed is a Senior Research Fellow in the IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit and Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh. He has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and undernutrition in developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey.

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Nutrition, Diets, and Health

Sharvari Patwardhan

Research Analyst

Bio

Sharvari Patwardhan is a Research Analyst in the Nutrition, Diets, and Health Unit at IFPRI, based in New Delhi. She is a development economist interested in research at the intersection of health, nutrition, and agriculture. Prior to joining IFPRI, Sharvari was a Research Associate in Health Economics and Social Care for the HOPE research group at the University of Manchester. She holds a master’s degree in Development Economics from SOAS, University of London, and a bachelor’s degree in Economics-Statistics from St. Xavier’s College, Autonomous, Mumbai.

Nutrition, Diets, and Health

Publications

Resource thumbnail

Preprint

Perceived constraints to healthy diets: Evidence from agrifood system assessments in rural South Asia

2025Patwardhan, Sharvari; Chakrabarti, Suman; Choo, Esther M.; Boncyk, Morgan; Blake, Christine; Kim, Sunny S.; Scott, Samuel P.
Details

Perceived constraints to healthy diets: Evidence from agrifood system assessments in rural South Asia

The healthfulness of diets in South Asia is limited by socio-economic and public infrastructure challenges. Perceptions about food such as availability, accessibility, desirability, and convenience can impact food choice and ultimately diets. However, there are limited tools to understand consumers’ perceptions of these factors and if perceptions relate to actual food intake. Using a novel tool administered across five rural districts in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, we quantify the association between food perceptions and food intake. A Likert scale (agree, neutral, disagree) was used to capture respondents’ perceptions about seven food choice drivers (affordability, accessibility, desirability, convenience, food quality, food safety, availability) for a list of six common foods. For each food, principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to identify latent “drivers”. The association between these and diets (using 24-hour dietary recall data) was estimated using multivariable regression analysis. There was considerable heterogeneity across countries with respect to the relative importance of food choice drivers and diet quality. There is a need to measure and understand individual food perceptions that drive food choice to help develop policies that promote healthier food choices.

Year published

2025

Authors

Patwardhan, Sharvari; Chakrabarti, Suman; Choo, Esther M.; Boncyk, Morgan; Blake, Christine; Kim, Sunny S.; Scott, Samuel P.

Citation

Patwardhan, Sharvari; Chakrabarti, Suman; Choo, Esther M.; Boncyk, Morgan; Blake, Christine; et al. 2025. Perceived constraints to healthy diets: Evidence from agrifood system assessments in rural South Asia. MedRxiv available January 9, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.25320037

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Capacity Building; Rural Areas; Healthy Diets; Agrifood Systems; Surveys

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.25320037 Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Preprint

Resource thumbnail

Preprint

Intrahousehold dynamics in South Asia: Understanding the relationships between women’s empowerment, task sharing, decision making, and diets among women

2025Kumar, Neha; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Manohar, Swetha; Banerjee, Archis; Gupta, Shivani; Chauhan, Alka; Patwardhan, Sharvari; Koirala, Uma
Details

Intrahousehold dynamics in South Asia: Understanding the relationships between women’s empowerment, task sharing, decision making, and diets among women

Despite the growing evidence on the role of women in agriculture and nutrition, interlinkages between empowerment among women, gendered task allocation, and nutrition are rarely studied together. Using data from the Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia (TAFSSA), a household survey that used a plate-to-farm assessment approach in three countries (Bangladesh, India and Nepal), the paper investigates the associations between empowerment of women, gendered task allocation, decision-making among women, and diets among women. Our findings reveal complex and context-specific differences in associations between task allocation, decision-making and empowerment among. While agency in decision-making among women is positively associated with empowerment in all three country contexts, associations between gendered task allocation and empowerment vary. The share of tasks performed by females, particularly in agriculture and food preparation) is positively associated with empowerment among women, but the proportion of tasks shared equally between males and females does not necessarily empower women. Gendered task allocation and empowerment among women are not significantly associated with diets of women in the three countries, owing to the greater importance of broader socio-economic and context-specific factors such as wealth, education, and regional factors in explaining the variance in dietary outcomes. These findings highlight the need to take a holistic approach that addresses gender norms and household resource constraints to improving empowerment of women, while also addressing local accessibility/availability of nutritious foods to enhance the quality of diets of women.

Year published

2025

Authors

Kumar, Neha; Quisumbing, Agnes R.; Manohar, Swetha; Banerjee, Archis; Gupta, Shivani; Chauhan, Alka; Patwardhan, Sharvari; Koirala, Uma

Citation

Kumar, Neha; Quisumbing, Agnes; Manohar, Swetha; Banerjee, Archis; Gupta, Shivani; Chauhan, Alka; Patwardhan, Sharvari; and Koirala, Uma. 2025. Intrahousehold dynamics in South Asia: understanding the relationships between women’s empowerment, task sharing, decision making, and diets among women. MedRxiv Preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.08.25320196

Country/Region

Bangladesh; India; Nepal

Keywords

Southern Asia; Asia; Intrahousehold Relations; Decision Making; Women’s Empowerment; Diet; Agriculture; Household Surveys; Gender Norms

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.08.25320196 Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Preprint

Resource thumbnail

Preprint

Assessing food acquisition, preparation, and consumption practices in South Asia: A systematic review of assessment tools

2025Patwardhan, Sharvari; Boncyk, Morgan; Avula, Rasmi; Blake, Christine; Akter, Fahmida; Das, Jai K.; Silva, Renuka; Menon, Purnima; Scott, Samuel P.
Details

Assessing food acquisition, preparation, and consumption practices in South Asia: A systematic review of assessment tools

Assessing behaviors related to food choice at individual- and household-levels is essential for improving household diets, but assessment tools are limited. We conducted a systematic review to identify gaps in existing assessment tools for food acquisition, preparation, and household consumption practices in South Asia, wherein diets are rapidly changing, and triple burden of malnutrition is emerging. Systematic search of three academic databases (PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection) using pre-defined keywords were undertaken to identify studies assessing food acquisition, food preparation, and household consumption practices in South Asia, published in English between 2000 and December 2023. Following PRISMA guidelines, two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts, and full texts based on the inclusion criteria, and extracted data on study characteristics and the assessment tools used to examine the food choice behaviors. Of 11,288 unique articles identified, 46 were included for synthesis. Food acquisition behaviors were assessed by 25 studies, food preparation by eight studies and household consumption practices by 26 studies. Most studies used quantitative methods (n=30), some used qualitative (n=13), and few used mixed methods (n=3), and varied by type of behavior assessed. Likert scales were the most widely used tools of quantitative assessments, while semi-structured interviews were the most common for qualitative assessments. Across the 46 studies, 59 different tools were used to assess food-related behaviors and only 14 studies claimed using validated tools and many studies did not include the full tool in the text or supplement (n=22). Our review highlights the need for expanding food choice behavior assessments to include the less-studied populations such as exploring young children and adolescents’ food choice behaviors and developing a contextually adaptable repository of validated tools to advance our understanding of food choice behaviors in various settings.

Year published

2025

Authors

Patwardhan, Sharvari; Boncyk, Morgan; Avula, Rasmi; Blake, Christine; Akter, Fahmida; Das, Jai K.; Silva, Renuka; Menon, Purnima; Scott, Samuel P.

Citation

Patwardhan, Sharvari; Boncyk, Morgan; Avula, Rasmi; Blake, Christine; Akter, Fahmida; et al. 2025. Assessing food acquisition, preparation, and consumption practices in South Asia: A systematic review of assessment tools. MedRxiv available January 6, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.25320042

Keywords

Southern Asia; Asia; Capacity Building; Food Consumption; Assessment; Feeding Preferences

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.25320042 Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Preprint