Mindy Spyker

Mindy Spyker has joined the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) as a US Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security for the next five months under the Livelihoods, gender and impact (LGI) program.

Spyker is a masters student at the University of South Florida in the field of public health. Her research interests are nutrition, mothers and infants, and global health disparities particularly related to gender. Her project at ILRI will focus on the impacts of women’s empowerment in livestock work on child health and nutrition based on fieldwork in Morogoro and Tanga in Tanzania, within the MoreMilkIT project sites.

Collaborating with the LGI team, Spyker will use qualitative research methodologies to describe in-depth the relationship between women’s empowerment and nutrition from the perspective of the women in livestock raising communities.