Access to good nutrition is a basic human right and a fundamental component of human dignity. Yet women and girls are twice as likely to suffer from malnutrition as men and boys, due to a combination of biological, social and cultural reasons.

When women and girls are empowered to claim their rights, it leads to improved health and nutrition for themselves and a better quality of life for their families and communities.

But achieving gender equality will not be possible as long as women and girls suffer from malnutrition at a much higher rate than men and boys.

Through programs and interventions that specifically target women, adolescent girls, and pregnant women, we help ensure they have access to improved nutrition.

Some of the interventions that reach women and girls include:

• Iron and folic acid supplementation for pregnant women
• Nutrition education and weekly iron and folic acid supplementation for adolescent girls
• Food fortification and salt iodization, which reach all populations with critical micronutrients like iron and iodine

Our Program Gender Equality Strategy ensures that all our programs promote gender equality, women’s empowerment and improved nutrition.

Grounded in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the World Health Assembly Global Nutrition Targets, and global efforts to promote gender equality, we seek to address gender barriers at all levels of the socio-ecological model by:

• Supporting gender responsive policy and strategy formulation, guidelines development and planning through technical assistance
• Integrating gender into multiple sectors, national nutrition programs, plans, and social safety net programs to address social norms and gender barriers
• Ensuring the health system and other systems delivering nutrition services are working for women and girls, and not reinforcing structural inequities
• Establishing women’s and youth empowerment groups and school clubs to promote and disseminate messages about gender equality through peer-to-peer approaches to increase women’s agency and knowledge of their rights
• Developing strategies to engage men and boys through targeted behaviour change communications
• Mobilizing key stakeholders’ involvement to ensure gender equity and create an enabling environment
• Partnering with women-led and women’s rights organizations to ground our work within local contexts

Gender mainstreaming  considers social and economic differences between men and women and power dynamics to ensure that proposed policies and programs have intended and fair results for women and men, girls and boys, and considers how actions contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment. We recognize the need for a twin-track approach and implementing gender targeted activities and programs alongside our mainstreaming efforts.

Throughout the programming cycle, we mainstream gender by:

• Providing capacity building and organization-wide gender equality training for staff
• Conducting intersectional sex- and gender-based analyses to ensure that new programs and partnerships understand and respond to the diverse needs, perspectives and experiences of women, girls, men and boys
• Developing gender action plans to ensure gender is considered in every aspect of project implementation
• Measuring and tracking progress on gender equality outcomes and indicators
• Communicating the results of our work on advancing gender equality and sharing best practice
• Advocating for equality and empowerment for women and girls and raise awareness on how gender barriers impact nutrition programming