Across developing countries, women play an important role both as producers
of major food crops and in improving household nutrition. This research
paper aims to assess the effect of improving women’s empowerment on the
nutritional status of children in rural Burkina Faso. Based on data from the
2014 Multisectoral Continuous Survey (EMC), the paper uses variables such as
income control, access to land, autonomy in production decisions, access to
credit and social group membership to compute a composite index of women’s
empowerment. Accounting for potential endogeneity of empowerment, the