Project in Burkina Faso

Enhancing Egg Consumption Through Women’s Empowerment in Burkina Faso

Timeline: March 2019 - June 2020

Funding: USAID

 Affiliated project: "Un Oeuf" project

Principal investigator (PI) and lead institution

Sarah McKune, University of Florida

Co-PI and collaborator institutions

• Aissata Wereme, Institute de l’Environnement et de Recherche Agricole INERA-Burkina Faso
• Heather Anderson, University of Florida

Results

Moore, E.V., Singh, N., Serra. R., and McKune, S.L. 2022. Household decision-making, women’s empowerment, and increasing egg consumption in children under five in rural Burkina Faso: Observations from a cluster randomized controlled trial. Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 6:1034618. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.1034618

Moore, E.V., Wood, E., Stark, H., Wereme N’Diaye, A., and McKune, S.L. 2023. Sustainability and scalability of egg consumption in Burkina Faso for infant and young child feeding. Front. Nutr. 9:1096256. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.1096256

Project Plan

How much benefit do young children receive when their mothers are empowered as smallholder farmers? This project aims to understand the relationships between women’s empowerment, behavior change tools,  and consumption of animal-source foods. It builds upon the project "Un Oeuf" (One Egg), which was also funded by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems.

Methods

This project uses the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) to collect quantitative data on five domains of empowerment. It also uses the innovative tool of Community Concept Drawing to capture sensitive information that may not be shared using traditional research methods. Households are being surveyed, focus groups are being conducted in 9 villages, and childhood growth is being measured. For child cognitive development, data collected include head circumference and the Ages and Stages questionnaire. Our team of researchers includes 4 master’s students in Burkina Faso, and 4 students at the University of Florida.

The primary outcome of the project will be the identification of empowerment domains associated with behavior change to improve human nutrition. The secondary outcome will be a gendered assessment of the concept of livestock gifting to improve animal-source food consumption in West Africa.

Objectives

The project’s 5 specific objectives are to:

1. examine the relationship between women’s empowerment and the adoption of behavior change to increase animal-source food consumption among infants and young children.
2. understand the role of women’s empowerment in the effectiveness of behavior change tools
3. understand the role of the Un Oeuf project on women’s empowerment
4. examine the potential of chicken ownership plus training to improve egg consumption, and
5. evaluate how these concepts might apply to neighboring countries.

More Information

 October 2020 research update MCKUNE VGM (Virtual General Meeting)