Decision Making Autonomy, a catalyst of Nutrition Level of women in Bangladesh: A case study of Dhaka

The level of nutrition of women is associated with a set of factors like socio-cultural, and economic. The status in the family and in the society and decision making autonomy of women contribute to overall health outcomes on themselves and also on the children. The result focused whether any significant relationship exits between decision making autonomy and level of nutrition in the Dhaka district where level of urbanization is about 92 percent.
Decision making autonomy is an important component of women’s empowerment. The proportion of Chronic Energy Deficiency (CED) women reduce as women participated more decisions in the family relating to health, major events etc. Not only the level of malnutrition decreases along with autonomy, but also the proportion of obesity (BMI>=25) reduces. These two categories of women (CED, Obese) are more vulnerable for maternal morbidity and mortality.
The logistic regression (multivariate) analyses show that likelihood to have CED is lower in higher level of decision making autonomy i.e. women with higher autonomy have lower chance to have chronic energy deficiency and vise-versa.
The findings demonstrated that wider decision making made by women in the family enabled them to improve their nutritional level (low malnutrition and reduce obesity).