Factors Affecting Household Food Security in Rural Districts of Rwanda

Abstract

The study was conducted to investigate the factors affecting household food security in rural districts of Rwanda. Specifically, the study aimed to assess the current state of household food security, analyze the influence of socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors on it, and evaluate gender-specific aspects of food security. The researchers used secondary data collected by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda in 2021 from 7,513 rural households for their analysis. They employed food security index estimation, logistic regression, and descriptive statistics to analyze the data. Within Rwanda's rural regions, the research discovered that family food security was greatly affected by variables such as the head of the household's age, education, farm size, gender, income, and access to credit, as well as the size of the home and money. Age and household size were negatively correlated with food security, in contrast to education, farm size, gender, income, and credit availability, which were positively correlated. Furthermore, compared to families headed by women, those headed by men were more likely to have food security, according to the research. In the rural areas of Rwanda, 60.83% of the families that were sampled had food security, while 39.13% had food insecurity. Improving food security in rural districts of Rwanda requires policies that target the unique difficulties experienced by individual families, as well as an emphasis on education and self-sufficiency, according to the study's results.