Determinants of Household Food Security Resilience: Lessons from Rwanda

Abstract

This study contributes to the emerging literature on household food security resilience by harmonizing food security indicators which capture different dimensions of food security, to compute a household food security resilience index that simultaneously reflects different dimensions of food security status. The estimated Poisson model had characteristics of the household, household head, sources of income, asset asset-related variables and other intuitive variables that could affect household food security resilience. Noteworthy in the results are the positive effect of income diversification, household savings, employment of household heads in the non-agricultural sector, gender, job stability, and education on household food security resilience. On the other hand, household size, dependent ratio, household head living away from the family, and being a seasonal worker or a daily paid worker are some variables that negatively impact household food security resilience. Although the negative coefficient of the income-generating sources of household food security resilience seems counterintuitive, this result shows that increase in the number of household businesses could impose time and resource constraints that could ultimately affect the food and nutritional security of the household over time.