In order to improve the nutrition and quality of life of women WFP supports the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). WFP provides micronutrient-fortified food to pregnant and lactating women and children who participate in the ICDS programme in six states. The fortified supplement also serves as an incentive for mothers and children to benefit from ICDS services. Everyday around 2.6 million women and children benefit by this programme. In selected districts, of Rajasthan, WFP provides Vitamin A, iron and folic acid and deworming tablets.

Drinking water units have been installed in villages without access to potable water.

Around 300,000 women receive WFP food for work. WFP programme helps in ensuring better access to food by placing food directly in the hands of women.

WFP supports nutrition and health education for adolescent girls and mothers which will help in improving the nutrition/ health and child caring capacities. This initiative is being implemented in selected districts of Rajasthan and Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh.

Drinking water units have been installed in villages without access to potable water.

WFP supports women's equal and full participation in power structures and decision making by supporting their active participation in grass-roots level groups such as the village forest protection committees, self-help groups, water user committees, Mahila Mandals and Village Development Committees.

A pilot project in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh was initiated to encourage entrepreneurship among tribal women. A manufacturing unit has been set up for the women who were trained not only to manage the production, but also the quality and marketing. The group is successfully supplying its the blended food manufactured in this unit to the Government of Madhya Pradesh for supply to the ICDS centres.

WFP takes positive action to facilitate women’s equal access to resources, employment, markets and trade. Keeping in line with this commitment, one of the strategies to provide underprivileged women access to resources was through micro-credit. The funds provided for this project are generated through the provision of food for work for workers employed by the Department of Forest and Environment. The project aims to increase women’s income and their participation in family financial decisions. The high success of this initiative in Bihar has prompted WFP to scale up its support to similar projects in other states such as Madhya Pradesh and Orissa.

WFP supports activities that increase women’s access to markets and trade and improve their skills. Some examples are silk weaving, mushroom cultivation, soap making, poultry, bee-keeping, herbal and medicinal plantations, handicrafts, tailoring, leaf-cup making, bead work, toy making and other small-scale enterprises.

WFP invests in gender sensitive programme planning

As part of strengthening the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) systems, with special reference to gender commitments, a South Asia Regional Workshop on Gender Sensitive M&E was organized to make M&E efforts more effective so as to capture developmental outcomes of WFP initiatives including the commitments to women.

WFP organised a 4 day workshop on "micro-finance /credit as a tool to reach women" This workshop identified ways of improving the outreach and impact of micro-credit.

One of our recent initiatives include a workshop organised in collaboration with the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation to gather inputs for developing gender strategies for WFP’s future programming.