Fighting Poverty with Better Nutrition for Women

March 31, 2011

Hunger and poverty continue to be major obstacles to the well-being of millions of women and children around the world. The Bread for the World Institute says those problems can be reversed by improving the social, economic and political status of rural women.

Executive Director Asma Lateef says reducing global hunger and poverty simply starts with better nutrition.

“Even today, despite progress on hunger and poverty over the last two to three decades, women still suffer disproportionately from hunger and disease around the world. More women suffer from malnutrition. Women are dying at alarming rates during childbirth. And it’s especially alarming in sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia,” she says.

Women are increasingly becoming the breadwinners of the families in rural areas of poor countries.

“It’s taken a while for people to understand that women’s needs and priorities and their roles are significantly different than men. And so as you design programs and projects you need to be extremely conscious of the different roles of men and women and how they access credit and markets and health services and their roles and responsibilities within families,” says Lateef.

Those programs, she says, should give women much greater access to social services.

“In many societies,” she says, “the lack of access to education, the lack of access to credit, land titles and things like that, that are really preventing women from being able to take advantage of market opportunities, economic opportunities. And we’ve also learned that if women are educated, the benefits from that education extend to their families. That women are much more equipped then to make the right choices in terms of the nutritional and health status of their children.”