Investing in Women

Investing in improved nutrition for women makes economic sense

Women’s nutritional and energy needs vary throughout the different stages of their lives. Proper nutrition is important for growth, healthy development, and maturation during adolescence, during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and as women age.

Ensuring high-quality diets will help unlock the development potential of individuals, boost economic productivity and reduce demands on expenditure in areas such as health and social protection.

Greater investment in preventing malnutrition can significantly reduce the burden of disease where malnutrition is an underlying cause and the high costs of treatment when the consequences are more severe. A diet and consumer-centric approach is a solution that we bring that needs to be adequately scaled up. This relies on using markets in addition to institutional delivery responses.

An ounce of investment for a pound of cure

Meals represent a common human experience that is nevertheless special to time, place, and culture. What people actually eat results from a complex set of interconnected production, marketing, and retail systems. What is eaten (or not) is influenced by personal preference, purchasing power, knowledge, social and religious norms, accessibility, advertising, and constraints linked to available time and space for preparation. Furthermore, what is eaten (or not) has a strong influence on the global burden of disease.

In the global response to the deepening nutrition crisis, many aid agencies and public interventions, promoting products such as pills, powders, and Ready to Use Supplementary Foods (RUSFs), have struggled to be effective on a large scale, with very low acceptability amongst women of reproductive age (as low as 20%), due to failure to adapt formats, packaging, flavors and delivery models to each population’s socio-cultural context.

These rations also have very low availability due to unsustainable and unscalable donor-based financing, and their failure to integrate solutions with local manufacturers and distributors. Multi-sector partnerships that harness market-based approaches can help to address these constraints to sustained scale and effectiveness.

Market-based models: the social enterprise approach to development

Addressing poor quality diets and malnutrition at large scale is critical to meet many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Addressing childhood malnutrition has one of the highest returns, with the Copenhagen Consensus estimating that there is a $16 return for every $1 invested.

MotherFood International has two scalable, sustainable models that achieve very high acceptability rates and create market-based access to great tasting, low-cost, fortified foods to improve women's nutrition. These products simultaneously stimulate local economies, can instill pride of ownership and eliminate the stigma associated with rations.

Alternatives for solving malnutrition

There is a paradigm shift away from treating malnutrition to prevention. This means focusing on nutrition programs that address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and children.

Women in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) typically eat a lower quantity and variety of nutritious foods than their male counterparts – even though, at specific stages in the life cycle, women require more dietary iron than men and more protein when pregnant or breastfeeding.

In a recent major review of diet quality in adolescent girls (10-20 years) in a wide range of LMICs, over half of the young women and adolescent girls surveyed were not able to meet their micronutrient needs.