How specific resilience pillars mitigate the impact of drought on food security: Evidence from Uganda

Abstract

Uganda continues to be prone to climate shocks especially drought which has adverse impact on food security. This paper studies household resilience capacities with special focus on how different resilience capacities mitigate the impact of drought on food security. The study follows the TANGO framework to identify resilience components, and two-step factor analysis to construct three resilience capacity indexes (absorptive, adaptive, and transformative) and overall resilience capacity index. To examine the mitigating role of resilience capacities, we interact resilience capacity indexes with the different measures of drought. The study employs a panel data from the Uganda National Panel Surveys (UNPS) undertaken between 2010/11 and 2018/19, spanning five waves. To minimise the bias arising from subjective self-reported drought shock, we introduce an objective measure of drought from the global SPEI database into the UNPS data. We also address attrition bias by controlling for attrition hazard estimated from the attrition function. Our analysis reveals that households in Uganda exhibit significantly low and nearly static resilience capacities. This implies majority of households in Uganda remain highly vulnerable to food insecurity in the event of severe drought. The study shows that building resilience capacities is an effective way of protecting households from such devastating situation. Whereas there are mixed results on the effectiveness of different resilience capacities in mitigating the effects of drought depending on the measure of food security and drought, decomposition of each of the three resilience capacities reveals critical aspects in each capacity. Succinctly, access to climate related information and linking social capital are very critical under adaptive capacity, infrastructure services are very key under transformative capacity, while informal safety nets are critical under absorptive capacity. Therefore, interventions that enhance households’ access to the above aspects are very important in building resilience to shocks, especially drought.