ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health and Nutrition
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1583678
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Socio-Cultural Factors in Human Nutrition: The Importance of Multidimensional Approaches.View all 7 articles
The Evolving Nexus of Women's Empowerment and Child Nutrition in India
Provisionally accepted
Bharti Singh1,2*
Shri Kant Singh2- 1International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India
- 2Survey Research and Data Analytics, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India
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Background India has one of the highest burdens of child undernutrition, globally. Undernutrition is a persistent challenge despite the country's economic growth. Empowering women is essential in addressing child undernutrition since empowered mothers are more inclined to obtain healthcare, enhance dietary diversity, and make informed choices that beneficially affect their children's health outcomes.The study aims to investigate the impact of women's empowerment their child nutrition outcomes in India using data from 2006 to 2021.This study is based on three recent rounds of the National Family Health Survey. A composite index of women's empowerment has been used to measure women's empowerment. Further, binary logistic regression and decomposition analysis have been used to analyze the relationship and contribution of the factors affecting undernutrition among children in India.Result Our research offers significant insights into the evolving dynamics of child undernutrition in India, particularly concerning the linkages with women's empowerment. While empowerment was insignificant in NFHS-3, it became a significant factor in NFHS-4 (-0.12**[-0.21,-0.03]) and NFHS-5 (-0.15***[-0.24,-0.06]) in reducing child undernourishment. Additionally, birth order, birth weight, and mother's BMI are critical determinants of undernourishment status among children under age five. Wealth remains a consistently significant contributor across all three survey rounds. Decomposition analysis further reinforces the significance of women's empowerment, demonstrating that it accounts for a 3.3% reduction in child undernutrition In India.The study underscores the critical role that empowering woman plays in combating child undernutrition, indicating the need for comprehensive strategies that prioritize women's empowerment alongside other critical determinants to effectively tackle the persistent challenge of child undernutrition in India. Health Survey (DHS) that provides consistent and reliable estimates of fertility, mortality, family planning, child nutritional status, morbidity, utilization of maternal and child health care services, anaemia, utilization and quality of health and family planning services. NFHS-3 collected information from 109,041 households, 124,385 women aged 15-49. NFHS-4 covered 699,686 women from over 601,000 households across 640 districts. NFHS-5 fieldwork for India was conducted in two phases, phase one from 17
Keywords: Undernutrition1, child nutrition2, Women's Empowerment3, Socioeconomic4, NFHS5, India6
Received: 18 Mar 2025; Accepted: 07 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Singh and Singh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bharti Singh, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India
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