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 Interactive GTFN Model

Our gender-transformative nutrition wheel is an interactive model that helps you visualize and understand the interplay of gender and nutrition.

Why a Gender-Transformative

Framework for Nutrition?

Nutrition and gender are intimately interconnected. Every day, women and girls experience poor nutrition disproportionately. Women and girls’ nutrition experience is influenced by the sociology and politics of how food is produced and consumed and how nutrition services are provided and used. Energy and nutrient requirements are informed both by sex and biology on the one hand, and gender roles and responsibilities on the other. In this way, gender inequality is both a cause and a consequence of malnutrition, which can trap women and girls in a vicious multigenerational cycle of poverty and unmet potential.

  • 60% of the world’s people with chronic hunger are women and girls. 

  • Micronutrient deficiencies remain significant concerns that disproportionately affect women and girls. Anemia is a leading cause of death for pregnant teenagers and the leading cause of disability for adolescent girls.

  • Gender inequalities restrict livelihood, education, and growth opportunities for women and girls, limiting access to and control over the resources needed to meet their unique nutrition needs. 

The impact of COVID-19 has exposed gaps that have always required a gender-transformative approach. Within a few months, COVID-19 has undone decades of progress towards improved nutrition. Women and girls are facing disruptions in access to nutrition and other essential services. These realities further limit their ability to realize their nutritional needs, changing the trajectories of their lives forever.

An effective response requires that we make achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls the central lynchpin upon which multi-sectoral responses to nutrition build.  Traditional power holders and influencers must be engaged in this process. They are important gender champions. Mobilized as agents of change, working together with women and girls and people of diverse gender identities, they can use their positions of power to shape systems that create a more equitable world for all.

 

The Gender-Transformative Framework for Nutrition is a truly innovative approach that equips everyone with a role in improving global nutrition to think differently so that we can do differently.

What is a Gender-Transformative

Framework for Nutrition?

The Gender-Transformative Framework for Nutrition is a Canadian-led, evidence-based conceptual model that expands the potential of nutrition programs to tackle gender inequalities. The Framework leverages existing literature and theoretical frameworks by applying systems thinking to critically examine the multi-sectoral drivers of malnutrition, while placing empowerment and gender equality at its centre.

 

This re-framing can help us understand how gender norms, institutions, and power relations are disempowering women and girls and causing unequal access to food, health and nutrition services, education, agricultural resources, markets, and technologies. In doing so, the Framework uncovers entry-points and facilitates solutions that can address the full social complexity of malnutrition. The approaches that flow from this starting point can synchronously build resilience to unanticipated shocks that undermine pathways to improved nutrition and gender equality.

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