Daniel Maxwell

Measuring food insecurity: the frequency and severity of “coping strategies”

Abstract Defining and interpreting food security, and measuring it in reliable, valid and cost-effective ways have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks. This paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurment, describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short-term food insecurity at the household level, and discusses ways of generalizing the method. The method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short-term insufficiency of food. This method goes beyond more commonly-used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decision-makers when faced with food insufficiency.

The Political Economy of Urban Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan African cities in the late 1990s face a daunting set of problems including rapid growth, increasing poverty, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate capacity for service provision. However, even as a renewed debate is shaping up around issues of urban development, there is little attention given to the question of urban food security and nutrition. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, urban food problems in Africa commanded political attention, the nature of urban food insecurity in the 1990s is such that it has tended to lose political importance. This is largely because in the 1970s, the problem was one of outright food shortages and rapid price changes that affected large portions of the urban population simultaneously. The impact of structural adjustment, continued rapid growth, and an increase in urban poverty make food insecurity in the 1990s primarily a problem of access by the urban poor. Under circumstances where the urban poor spend a very large portion of their total income on food, urban poverty rapidly translates into food insecurity. The lack of formal safety nets, and the shifting of responsibility for coping with food insecurity away from the state towards the individual and household level has tended to atomize and muffle any political response to this new urban food insecurity. This paper briefly reviews urban food insecurity and generates a set of empirical questions for an analysis of food and livelihood security in contemporary urban Sub-Saharan Africa, and then examines historical and contemporary evidence from Kampala, Uganda, and Accra, Ghana, to suggest some tentative conclusions.

Good Care Practices Can Mitigate the Negative Effects of Poverty and Low Maternal Schooling on Children’s Nutritional Status: Evidence from Accra

This study uses data from a representative survey of households with preschoolers in Accra, Ghana to (1) examine the importance of care practices for childrens height-for-age z-scores (HAZ); and (2) identify subgroups of children for whom good maternal care practices may be particularly important. Good caregiving practices related to child feeding and use of preventive health services were a strong determinant of childrens HAZ, specially among children from the two lower income terciles and children whose mothers had less than secondary schooling. In this population, good care practices could compensate for the negative effects of poverty and low maternal schooling on childrens HAZ. Thus, effective targeting of specific education messages to improve child feeding practices and use of preventive health care could have a major impact on reducing childhood malnutrition in Accra.

Working Women in an Urban Setting: Traders, Vendors and Food Security in Accra

Data collected from a 1997 household survey carried out in Accra, Ghana, are used to look at the crucial role that women play as income earners and in securing access to food in urban areas. The high number of female-headed households and the large percent of working women in the sample provide a good backdrop for looking at how women earn and spend income differently than men in an urban area. Livelihood strategies for both men and women are predominantly labor based and dependent on social networks. For all households in the sample, food is still the single most important item in the total budget. Yet, important and striking differences between men and womens livelihoods and expenditure patterns exist. Compared to men, women are less likely to be employed as wage earners, and more likely to work as street food vendors or petty traders. Women earn lower incomes, but tend to allocate more of their budget to basic goods for themselves and their children, while men spend more on entertainment for themselves only. Despite lower incomes and additional demands on their time as housewives and mothers, female-headed households, petty traders, and street food vendors have the largest percentage of food secure households. This paper explores differences in income, expenditure, and consumption patterns in an effort to answer this question, and suggests ways that urban planners and policymakers can address special concerns of working women in urban areas.

Alternative food-security indicators: revisiting the frequency and severity of `coping strategies'

Abstract Recent research on the multi-factorial nature of food security has provided a wealth of analytical insight, but measurement problems remain a major challenge, not only for research, but particularly for targeting, program management, monitoring and evaluation. Building on an approach suggested in a 1996 article, this paper constructs a series of alternative food-security indicators based on the frequency and severity of consumption-related coping strategies. These alternative indicators are then compared with more standard measures, including a consumption benchmark, a poverty benchmark and a nutritional benchmark using data from the 1997 Accra Urban Food and Nutrition Study. Against these more traditional indicators, the coping strategy indicators are best at ruling out cases—that is, minimizing the risk of classifying a food-insecure household as food-secure. They also help to identify sources of vulnerability and the trade-offs made with other basic needs to acquire sufficient food. The measures outlined here are much less time-consuming and less expensive in terms of data collection and analysis, and therefore perhaps offer a pragmatic alternative to food and livelihood program managers. However, the comparative analysis of conventional benchmarks with the coping strategies indicator reveals some shortcomings with the benchmark indicators as well—a sign that perhaps the indicators of food security proposed here are both alternative and complementary measures.

Alternative food security strategy: A household analysis of urban agriculture in Kampala

Abstract Farming within African cities has become an increasingly important source of food for urban populations. Yet little is understood about the forces behind urban farming or its impact at the household level. Intrahousehold dynamics and gender relations, as well as declining wages and economic informalization are all important to an understanding of urban farming. Access to land is a major constraint, and only a small fraction of urban farmers own their land. For those with access to land, urban farming is associated with higher levels of household food security and child nutrition. This paper outlines the linkages between economic strategies, access to land, and food security, and discusses the policy implications of urban farming.

Does Geographic Targeting of Nutrition Interventions Make Sense in Cities? Evidence from Abidjan and Accra

Although most developing country cities are characterized by pockets of substandard housing and inadequate service provision, it is not known to what degree low incomes and malnutrition are confined to specific neighborhoods. This analysis uses representative household surveys of Abidjan and Accra to quantify small-area clustering in service provision, demographic characteristics, consumption, and nutrition. Both cities showed significant clustering in housing conditions but not in nutrition, while income was clustered in Abidjan, but less so in Accra. This suggests that neighborhood targeting of poverty-alleviation or nutrition interventions in these and similar cities could lead to undercoverage of the truly needy.

Does urban agriculture help prevent malnutrition? Evidence from Kampala

Abstract Previous research has suggested that urban agriculture has a positive impact on the household food security and nutritional status of low-income status groups in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, but a formal test of the link between semi-subsistence urban food production and nutritional status has not accompanied these claims. This paper seeks to redress this gap in the growing literature on urban agriculture through an analysis of the determinants of the nutritional status of children under five in Kampala, Uganda, where roughly one third of all households in the sample engage in some form of urban agriculture. When controlling for other individual child, maternal, and household characteristics, these data indicate that urban agriculture has a positive, significant association with higher nutritional status of children, particularly height for age. Several pathways by which this relationship is manifested are suggested, and the implications of these results for urban food and nutrition policy and urban management are briefly discussed.

Land tenure and food security: Exploring dynamic linkages

Land tenure and food security have each been the subject of extensive—but generally separate—research in the past. Links between the two issues are now receiving increased attention, yet critical links between them remain unexplored. After a brief review of the two concepts, this article combines both issues within a dynamic framework that recognizes not just the conventional link between access to land and access to food in the short run, but also the recursive link between access to food and the ability to maintain sufficient resources to meet long-run needs. Such a framework makes explicit the trade-offs that poor households may face in bad years between consumption and investment in non-labour assets. Perhaps less intuitively, it also suggests that the need for self-insurance may force poor households to choose less efficient crops or production strategies than wealthier households even in good years. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for equity, efficiency, research, and policy.

Humanitarian information systems and emergencies in the Greater Horn of Africa: logical components and logical linkages.

Natural and man-made emergencies are regular occurrences in the Greater Horn of Africa region. The underlying impoverishment of whole populations is increasing, making it more difficult to distinguish between humanitarian crises triggered by shocks and those resulting from chronic poverty. Shocks and hazards can no longer be seen as one-off events that trigger a one-time response. In countries that are both poor and exposed to frequent episodes of debilitating drought or chronic conflict, information needs tend to be different from the straightforward early warning/commodity accounting models of information systems that have proven reliable in past emergencies. This paper describes the interdependent components of a humanitarian information system appropriate for this kind of complex environment, noting the analytical links between the components and operational links to programme and policy. By examining a series of case studies from the Greater Horn region, the paper demonstrates that systems lacking one or more of these components will fail to provide adequate information--and thus incur humanitarian costs. While information always comes with a cost, the price of poor information--or none--is higher. And in situations of chronic vulnerability, in which development interventions are likely to be interspersed with both safety nets and emergency interventions on a recurrent basis, investment in improved information is a good investment from both a humanitarian and a financial viewpoint.