Shorter, Cheaper, Quicker, Better : Linking Measures of Household Food Security to Nutritional Outcomes in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Uganda, and Tanzania
Using nationally representative household survey data from five countries -- three from South Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal) and two from Sub-Saharan Africa (Tanzania and Uganda) -- this paper conducts a systematic assessment of the correla...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16017 |
| Summary: | Using nationally representative
household survey data from five countries -- three from
South Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal) and two from
Sub-Saharan Africa (Tanzania and Uganda) -- this paper
conducts a systematic assessment of the correlation between
various measures of household food security and nutritional
outcomes of children. The analysis, following the
universally accepted and applied definition of food
security, is based on some of the most commonly used
indicators of food security. The results show that the
various measures of household food security do appear to
carry significant signals about the nutritional status of
children that reside within the household. This result holds
even after the analysis controls for a wide array of other
socio-economic characteristics of the households that are
generally also thought to be associated with the quality of
child nutrition. If using these food security indicators as
proxy measures for the underlying nutritional status of
children is of some interest, then the results show that
simple, cost-effective, and easy-to-collect measures, such
as the food consumption score or the dietary diversity
score, may carry at least as much information as other
measures, such as per capita expenditure or the starchy
staple ratio, which require longer and costlier surveys with
detailed food consumption modules. Across five different
countries in South Asia and Africa, the results suggest that
the food consumption score, in particular, performs
extremely well in comparison with all other measures from
the perspective of nutritional targeting as well as for
monitoring nutritional outcomes. |
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