The Household Food Security Implications of Disrupted Access to Basic Services in Five Cities in the Global South

Abstract

COVID-19 has caused significant disruptions regarding the extent to which households can access basic services and resources in cities around the world. Previous studies have indicated a predictive relationship between the consistency of resource access and food access among urban households. These investigations, however, have predominantly been isolated to Southern Africa and have not accounted for other dimensions of food security. To test whether these results are observable outside Southern Africa, and with a more multidimensional measure of food security, this investigation proposes a method for building an index of urban household food access, utilization and stability. The scores for the constructed index are then compared across household survey samples collected from five cities in the Global South. The investigation then assesses the predictive relationship between the consistency of household resource access and this more multidimensional index of food insecurity. While the general trend of inconsistent resource access predicting food insecurity is confirmed, there are geographic differences in the strength and quality of this relationship. These findings suggest that the resource access disruptions inflicted by COVID-19 will likely have a heterogeneous impact on urban food security dependent upon the affected resource and the city in which a given household resides.

Analysis of incidence, intensity, and gender perspective of multidimensional urban poverty in Kenya

“…Socioeconomic factors such as urban household food insecurity status have been found endogenous in predicting multidimensional household poverty, especially in an urban setting [ 95 ]. On the one hand, several studies have revealed the effect of household poverty on urban food insecurity in most cities in Global South economies [ 96 ].…”

Measuring Food Insecurity: The Problem with Semantics

“…As no single measure is adequately represents all aspects of food insecurity, many organizations have begun triangulating their use of measurements and indicators [68,71]. Some have found value in utilizing indirect measurements such as food balance sheets, temperature, rainfall, marketing data, political instability, trade policies, or household size and dependency ratios to capture the concept more fully [1,5,39].…”

“…Unfortunately, some have erroneously used measurements interchangeably, failing to recognize that not all methods capture the same thing [5,39]. To tackle this issue, some have recommended that interchangeable measures of food security be developed [71].…”

“…Another common measure is the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS). The HFIAS was developed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and is like the HFSSM and FEIS in that it is primarily used to measure a household's access to food [68,71]. It has a 30-day recall period and includes nine questions about psychological and behavioral factors influencing food security at the household level [49,70].…”