A systematic review of review studies on women’s empowerment and food security literature

Ending hunger and malnutrition is a significant policy goal in the United Nations’ 2030 agenda for sustainable development (Sustainable Development Goal 2). According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food security exists when people have economical, physical, and social access to safe and sufficient food to meet their dietary requirements (FAO, 2018). The recent statistics of FAO, reported that despite numerous efforts, 2.37 billion individuals faced severe food insecurity in 2020, and this figure abruptly spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic (FAO et al., 2021). Several other factors are also found liable for hunger and malnutrition in recent years, including disparities driven by unequal power dynamics. Many academicians viewed food security from the perspective of “human development” and emphasized the need to provide individuals with an agency (Sen, 1985). This is because food security is not simply accessibility, availability, and stability of food; individuals also need to make the best use of resources to secure quantitative and qualitative food (Petrescu-Mag et al., 2018; Si et al., 2021). At the individual level, increased agency leads to many developmental outcomes, including food security (Malapit et al., 2015; Rehman et al., 2019). At the community level, the increased collective agency is likely to boost food security through raised power of speech and involvement in food and agricultural development programs (Kerr et al., 2019).

Globally, gender parity has been incorporated in several debates to advance economic growth and food security. Remarkably, numerous researchers have supported sturdy associations of gender disparity with food insecurity, predominantly in the case of destitute and marginalized women within frequent access to productive inputs and resources (Aziz et al., 2020; Wei et al., 2021). Holland and Rammohan (2019) indicated that women could reduce the undernourished population worldwide by 95–100 million by acting as caretakers and food producers. Women are involved in several farm and non-farm tasks. Thus, their empowerment in producing various vegetables and fruits at homesteads is vital in securing food and nutrition (Rahman & Islam, 2014). However, gender disparity, particularly among marginalized women, limits their ability to control their own lives (Aziz et al., 2021a, b). To address the food concerns, individual agencies must make meaningful choices (Luginaah et al., 2019) to enable them to become food citizens (Fernandez-Wulff, 2019). Gender disparities, limit people's capacity to exert control over their own lives, and thus influence their own well-being (Kabeer, 1999; Thompson, 2015). Sen (1981) revealed that an individual's right to food is ascertained not only by the mere availability of food in the markets but also by their asset endowments, employment, and social rights. However, structural inequities in society hamper their voice and participation (Collins, 2022). Sen (1999) reported that food crises do not befall in civilizations that give fair opportunities to all individuals.

The link of women's empowerment with food security has been extensively addressed in the prevailing literature. A panorama of review articles using various ideas has been published in the literature (Johnston et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2017; Pandey et al., 2016; Poulsen et al., 2015) however, a comprehensive overview of the patterns and significant results of such review studies have not yet been provided. To advance, a discipline must know its past arrays to get acumens into probable progress and consequences that add to the existing body of knowledge (Dwivedi et al., 2011). Review studies generally provide a broader glimpse of a specific concept or notion (Kandampully et al., 2014). The prime objective of a review study is to study the changes and growth of a discipline on a specific topic to provide researchers with improved information on the history and trends of the field (Kim et al., 2018). Thus, the current study offers a wide-ranging summary of the published review studieson women's status and food security nexus, which have been gaining interest for a long time. This study conducted a systematic examination of review papers. The word “systematic” states the procedure that involves the particular questions, the aim of the study, the research approach, and the enclosure and exclusion criteria employed for the reviews. The principal objective was to provide researchers with an overview of the notions reported in the review studies and critical findings of review studies published to date so that future research may be conducted in the proper direction.

The organized technique employed in the current study is described in section 2, i.e., a systematic examination of published review studies using PRISMA checklist. The elucidation of results and interpretations is presented in section 3 under three dimensions; a) nexus between empowerment of women and food security, b) nexus among agricultural interventions, empowerment of women, and food security, and c) nexus among other factors, empowerment of women, and food security. Lastly, the paper concludes the study. Moreover, the existing knowledge gaps are also discussed in this section.