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Households and food security: lessons from food secure households in East Africa

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/9310/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40066-015-0042-4
10.1186/s40066-015-0042-4
 
Title Households and food security: lessons from food secure households in East Africa
 
Creator Silvestri, S
Sabine, D
Patti, K
Wiebke, F
Maren, R
Ianetta, M
Carlos, Q F
Mario, H
Anthony, N
Nicolas, N
Joash, M
Lieven, C
Cristina, R M
 
Subject Food and Nutrition
Agriculture-Farming, Production, Technology, Economics
 
Description Background
What are the key factors that contribute to household-level food security? What lessons can we learn from food secure households? What agricultural options and management strategies are likely to benefit female-headed households in particular? This paper addresses these questions using a unique dataset of 600 households that allows us to explore a wide range of indicators capturing different aspects of performance and well-being for different types of households—female-headed, male-headed, food secure, food insecure—and assess livelihoods options and strategies and how they influence food security. The analysis is based on a detailed farm household survey carried out in three sites in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Results
Our results suggest that food insecurity may not be more severe for female-headed households than male-headed households. We found that food secure farming households have a wider variety of crops on their farms and are more market oriented than are the food insecure. More domestic assets do not make female-headed households more food secure. For the other categories of assets (livestock, transport, and productive), we did not find evidence of a correlation with food security. Different livelihood portfolios are being pursued by male versus female-headed households, with female-headed households less likely to grow high-value crops and more likely to have a less diversified crop portfolio.

Conclusions
These findings help identify local, national and regional policies and actions for enhancing food security of female-headed as well as male-headed households. These include interventions that improve households’ access to information, e.g., though innovative communication and knowledge-sharing efforts and support aimed at enhancing women’s and men’s agricultural market opportunities.
 
Publisher BioMed Central Ltd
 
Date 2015-12-04
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Rights —
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/9310/1/art%253A10.1186%252Fs40066-015-0042-4.pdf
Silvestri, S and Sabine, D and Patti, K and Wiebke, F and Maren, R and Ianetta, M and Carlos, Q F and Mario, H and Anthony, N and Nicolas, N and Joash, M and Lieven, C and Cristina, R M (2015) Households and food security: lessons from food secure households in East Africa. Agriculture & Food Security, 4 (23). 01-15. ISSN 2048-7010