A multi-country economic and operational diagnostic of gender integration in large-scale fortification firms across Asia, conducted in partnership with Nutrition International.
Nutrition International, a leading global nutrition organization, was working with food fortification firms across Asia to expand the reach of fortified staple foods — a proven intervention against micronutrient deficiency. Many of these firms employed women in significant numbers, particularly in production and quality control roles, but operational practices, workplace conditions, and advancement pathways for women varied widely.
The question Nutrition International brought to us was deceptively simple: does it pay, in operational and financial terms, for fortification firms to invest in gender integration? If the answer was yes, what would the business case look like, and what specific practices would it support?
The existing literature on gender and the workplace was substantial, but most of it was either macro (national labor force statistics) or sectoral (textiles and garments). Almost none of it was firm-level economic analysis specifically on food fortification businesses in low- and middle-income Asian contexts. We could not simply import findings.
Compounding this, the firms themselves did not always track the data needed to build a financial case — turnover by gender, productivity differentials, training costs, absenteeism patterns. Where data existed, it was rarely disaggregated. Where it did not exist, we would need to build it.
Praxsys designed a five-strand engagement combining operational diagnostics, financial modeling, qualitative research, comparative analysis, and synthesis:
The team included senior economists, food sector specialists, and gender researchers, working in pairs across each country deep-dive. Field research was conducted in local languages by researchers with prior experience in the sector.
Three findings stood out:
The productivity gap was real, but its direction surprised us. In several firms, women workers showed measurably higher productivity in specific tasks — quality control, packaging precision, and certain stages of micronutrient blending. The gap, where it existed, was often in favor of women. Firms that did not recognize this were under-deploying a productive workforce.
Turnover, absenteeism, and supervisor-managed retention costs were significantly lower in firms that had implemented modest gender integration practices — flexible shift design, on-site childcare or childcare support, and clear advancement pathways. The cost savings, modeled conservatively, exceeded the investment in nearly every case we studied.
The single highest-leverage intervention was supervisor training — not policy reform, not facility upgrades, but the day-to-day quality of frontline management. Firms that invested in supervisor training showed the largest delta on retention and productivity outcomes.
The business case for gender integration in fortification is not a charity case. It is an operational efficiency case that has been hiding in plain sight.
The engagement delivered to Nutrition International included a synthesis report, eight country deep-dives, a financial model template, and an operational toolkit for engagement with fortification firms. Modeled productivity uplift across the sample firms reached 64% in the highest-performing case, with median uplift of 18-22% from a combination of practices.
Nutrition International is using the findings to shape its sector engagement strategy across the region. Several of the firms involved in the diagnostic have begun implementing recommended practices.
We continue to work with Nutrition International on adjacent engagements in the food fortification space.
The engagement reinforced something we have come to expect: business cases for inclusive practice are usually defensible, but only when they are built on firm-specific data. Generic numbers do not persuade firm-level decision-makers. The methodological investment in collecting and modeling firm-level data was what made the analysis credible to operational managers. It is a lesson we apply across our practice: rigour, calibrated to the level of decision-making it needs to support.
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