Feeding Families Through Freedom

In Afghanistan, educated women are more likely to lead food-secure households.

As human rights in Afghanistan began to suffer immense setbacks after the Taliban's return to power in 2021, Yiqi Zhu, PhD, assistant professor in the Adelphi University School of Social Work, found her research on food security becoming more important than ever. In the first year of the Taliban regime, according to the World Food Programme, 24 million Afghans lacked sufficient food, while malnourishment affected more than 7 million children and mothers.

Food security measures a family's ability to afford quality food. For rural Afghan families, a family on the high end of the food security scale might be able to dine on meat once or twice a week, along with foods like eggs, milk and butter. A family experiencing food insecurity might be reliant solely on staple crops like bread and rice.

Before the Taliban takeover, Dr. Zhu had been collaborating with her mentor, Jean-Francois Trani, PhD, and a team in Afghanistan on several projects. Using data collected from a 2017 survey of Afghan families in rural areas, they looked at how levels of education affected a family's food security.

Collecting the necessary data was a dangerous business, even before 2021. Most of the economic studies on Afghanistan are based on national-level data, but these projects relied on surveys brought to individual Afghan homes by field workers, which offered a far more detailed view of rural Afghan socioeconomic conditions. Dr. Zhu's team was forced to contend not only with the country's precarious political situation, but also with the need to protect field workers from potential harm.

The team's initial paper was written in the middle of the 2021 Taliban offensive. Suddenly, the data Dr. Zhu was analyzing became a preview of how life in Afghanistan might deteriorate under the Taliban regime-and, specifically, its mounting campaign against women's rights. "The most important message we wanted to deliver through this paper is that women's education is very important for the health of Afghanistan," Dr. Zhu said, pointing out that economists commonly overlook women's role in economic development. "Women are the backbone both of the family and of the country."

Prior to 2021, many educated women in Afghanistan worked in government jobs or nonprofits, bringing additional income, stability and dietary diversity to their families. Their presence in the dataset allowed Dr. Zhu's team to compare women's impact on household food security by education level-which led to their publication of "The Association Between Women's Education and Employment and Household Food Security in Afghanistan" in The European Journal of Development Research.¹

Through a cross-sectional analysis, the team found a distinct correlation between the education level of the woman in a household and the level of food security her family enjoyed. Notably, families with a formally educated woman had a 67 percent higher chance of being food secure. Yet families where both the man and woman were formally educated only experienced a 52 percent increase in food security. This meant that, by and large, the woman's level of education is the most significant factor in household food security.

As Dr. Zhu explains, a formally educated woman will bring more than food to her home. Thanks to her knowledge base and ability to allocate sufficient nutritional resources to her children, the impact on her family will be systemic and long-lasting.

Since the Taliban takeover, no further active fieldwork has taken place. But even without additional data, Dr. Zhu is confident in her work's continued resonance. If the Taliban continue to suppress women's education, employment and presence in public life, the consequence will be hungrier families nationwide-and catastrophic effects on the population's long-term well-being. "It's not just about women," she said. "It's about the health of the next generations, too."

Read more in the 2025 issue of Academic & Creative Research Magazine, where we highlight the innovation and imagination shaping Adelphi's academic community.

1 Zhu, Y., et al. (2024). The Association Between Women's Education and Employment and Household Food Security in Afghanistan. The European Journal of Development Research, 36(4), 841-867. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-023-00614-9

About Yiqi Zhu, PhD

Yiqi Zhu, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work. Her primary research goal is to develop and implement community-based interventions to improve the health outcomes of children from vulnerable families, especially programs and strategies to enhance food security, form healthy dietary behaviors and prevent malnutrition. Working with partners around the globe, she conducts policy and program comparisons that bring the global experience to the local community and advance social justice in both arenas.