Every woman's plate in three African countries is assembled from local ingredients, not from universal guidelines. In The Gambia, Kenya and Mozambique, researchers spent three and a half years asking 7715 women what they had eaten in the past 24 hours and sorting the answers onto ten food shelves: grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, dairy, eggs, nuts and oils. It turned out that only every other woman reaches the standard of "at least five shelves a day."
The country figures sound like different cuisines. In The Gambia, where two-thirds of women never finished school and poverty is the highest of the three countries, 65 out of 100 eat a varied diet. In Kenya the figure is 45, and in Mozambique 39. So the wallet and the diploma are not the head chefs in this kitchen: local recipes and habits matter more.
But not everything depends on tradition. Education, work and family size also add ingredients: women with higher education have nearly twice the odds of a varied diet, while living alone or only with children lowers them. Poverty acts like a meager grocery basket: the higher the likelihood of poverty, the poorer the plate, and in Mozambique almost every sixth woman eats two food groups or fewer.
This work was the first to compare pregnant and non-pregnant women from the same communities in West, East and Southern Africa using a single questionnaire. Previously the data were fragmentary, mostly from Ethiopia, and it seemed that dietary diversity was explained by income and education. Now it is clear: universal recommendations will not work unless local culinary culture is taken into account. In The Gambia, for instance, traditional dishes made from millet, peanuts and leafy vegetables by themselves assemble a rich plate, even when money is short.
A plate assembled from local ingredients rather than universal recommendations brings us back to the beginning: in the three African countries it looks different, and nutrition programs should learn from local cuisines instead of imposing a single recipe on them. Then every woman will have a chance to fill her own complete plate.
In The Gambia, 63% of women had no formal schooling and the probability of poverty was the highest of the three countries, yet it was there that the share of women with sufficient dietary diversity was the greatest: 65.1%.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.