Woman at the market in Bangladesh. (IFPRI Images/Flickr)
On October 29, 2015, the government of Bangladesh officially launched the project, Orienting Agriculture toward Improved Nutrition and Women’s Empowerment, known as ANGeL.
The ANGeL project, which refers to Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages, is a pilot project being implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture in Bangladesh. It is partially funded by USAID, with technical assistance from IFPRI’s Bangladesh Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP) and Helen Keller International (HKI). The project aims to identify actions and investments in agriculture that can leverage agricultural development for improved nutrition, and make recommendations on how to invigorate pathways to women’s empowerment—particularly within agriculture. Evidence from this project may be used to design, implement, and scale up the most effective interventions to improve nutrition and women’s empowerment at a national level.
With a room packed with NGO partners, donors, supporters, and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture, the October launch of this country-led initiative was a success. Furthermore, it serves as an important milestone in Bangladesh, demonstrating the country’s commitment to strengthening its agriculture-nutrition-gender nexus and towards improving nutrition through approaches that are informed by research-based evidence.
In her address at IFPRI’s recent 40th anniversary event in Washington DC, Bangladesh’s Minister of Agriculture, honorable Matia Chowdhury, confirmed her country’s commitment to addressing malnutrition, saying, “the government of Bangladesh considers agriculture, food security, and nutrition as its top most priorities.”
Speaking at both IFPRI and at the Second International Conference on Nutrition in Rome, she took the opportunity to announce the ANGeL initiative, citing its potential to leverage agricultural development to improve nutrition and understand the pathways to women’s empowerment. She said, “Our Ministry of Agriculture is implementing the project…to gauge the impact of farmers’ income, household food security, women’s empowerment, and child and maternal nutrition. The evidence thus gathered will be used to shape the design of a national program.”
More specifically, the Ministry of Agriculture plans to use the research-based evidence created by the pilot project to design, implement, and scale up the most effective interventions to improve nutrition and women’s empowerment at the national level. Expected benefits include improved nutrition, higher social status of women, increased incomes of farmers through high value and high nutritive value-added agricultural production, and accelerated nutrition-enhancing agricultural growth.
