The Food for Peace Shouhardo II program (CARE) targeted households and communities in northern Bangladesh as part of the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative. A central aim of the program was to empower women. Data collected in the area targeted by Shouhardo II during a catastrophic flood in 2014 demonstrates the value of these investments, as well as the critical importance of women’s empowerment as a source of resilience. Households in which women were more empowered were able to maintain and even improve their food security in the face of the catastrophic flood, while households in which women were less empowered experienced a severe decline.

Note: The protective effect of women’s empowerment as a source of resilience increased as the severity of exposure to flood conditions increased. Other factors that may explain why some households were more resilient than others were controlled for to isolate the effect of women’s empowerment.