Women’s involvement in intra-household decision-making and infant and young child feeding practices in central Asia

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and infant and young child feeding practices in Central Asia using Demographic and Health Survey datasets collected during 1995–2017. We employ a measure of women’s empowerment with three distinct dimensions that is available for a subset of recent surveys as well as a simpler measure of empowering capturing decision-making power over use of one’s own income among women earning income, present in all surveys. We identify a positive association between a woman’s decision-making power—a measure of her instrumental agency—and adherence to World Health Organization–recommended complementary feeding practices related to achieving minimum dietary diversity and minimum acceptable diet. We find no significant association between a woman’s attitude toward domestic violence or her degree of social independence and adherence to recommended complementary feeding practices after accounting for her decision-making power. Our results further show that women’s decision-making power has the greatest predictive power for adherence to optimal infant and young child feeding practices among mothers who are a daughter-in-law to the household head. We thus provide evidence from Central Asia that empowering women to make household decisions improves not only women’s well-being, but also child health, and that policies and programs intended to empower women are more effective when directed at extended households in which mothers cohabitate with in-laws.