Determinants of Household Food Insecurity in Rural Ethiopia: Multiple Linear Regression (Classical and Bayesian Approaches)

Efrem Belachew Sime

doi:10.11648/j.ijtam.20200605.12

Abstract

This paper examined the determinants of food insecurity among rural households in Ethiopia using data obtained from Households Consumption and Expenditure (HCE) and Welfare Monitoring (WMS) Survey conducted in 2011 by Central Statistical Agency (CSA). Bayesian multiple liner regression analysis was employed to identify determinant factors of rural household’s food insecurity, diet quality. The study revealed that the diet quality measure for rural households was obtained to be 68% who food secured and 32% who food in secured. The results of the analysis show that the variables, educational level of head of households, annual per capita expenditure of a households, farm land size of a households, number of oxen owned by the farm households, distance to input source, age of the households head, household size, gender of head of household, participating in off-farm activities, production storage and shocks such as: price rice of food items, ﬂood, drought and illness were found to be the most important determinants of households food insecurity. Accordingly, the study suggests that a judicious combination of interventions that enhance income diversiﬁcation opportunities in rural areas through promoting off-farm activities, family planning, and education, training and extension services could help enhance household food security. Provision of awareness creation on better and productive utilization of such resources as production storage should also be emphasized in rural areas. Generally improvements in fourteen predictor variables have the potential to increase the number of food secured households in rural households of Ethiopia.

Highlights

The latest report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World (FAO, 2015) estimates the number of people undernourished in 2014-16 at 795 million or 10.9% of the total, a reduction from 18.6% in 1990-92 [1]
Among the variables included in the analysis: The confidence region of the posterior estimates for the dietary diversity score in table 3 indicates that participating in off farm activities, educational level of head of household, annual per capita expenditure of a household, farm land size of a household, number of oxen owned by the farm household, Production stored, gender of head of household, distance to input source, age of the household head and shocks such as: price rice of food items, drought, illness and flood does not contains zero, we reject < at α=5% level of significance implies that there is a significant linear relationship between explanatory variables and the response variable diet quality (HDDS) on the food insecurity
The result of this study indicate that holding all other factors constant, the Dietary Diversity Score is expected to be decrease by 0.181 for the households exposed to price rice of food items as compared with households who do not exposed

Summary

Introduction

The latest report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World (FAO, 2015) estimates the number of people undernourished in 2014-16 at 795 million or 10.9% of the total, a reduction from 18.6% in 1990-92 [1]. The report notes that the vast majority of the hungry (780 million people) live in the developing world and the overall share of the hungry currently stands at 12.9% of the total population. The same report estimates that the share of people in Ethiopia who are undernourished in 2014-16 is 32%, a reduction from 74.8% in 1990-92. This assertion of attribution echoes other studies such as [2, 3].

Objectives

Results

Conclusion