Prevalence of household food insecurity in Ethiopia during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from panel data

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global problem that confronted the economy and household food security of many countries. This study aimed to analyze the determinants of a household's food insecurity status in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia. A panel data of 2,410 households in a six-round High-Frequency Phone Survey were retrieved from the World Bank database. The product of the corresponding pairwise severity weight and household responses to each coping strategy was summed up to get the individual's Coping Strategy Index. The Random Effect Model (REM) for panel data analysis was used to identify factors associated with household-related food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The descriptive statistics result shows that 18.63% and 11.08% of rural households and 56.55% and 38.13% of urban residents were food secure in the first and sixth rounds, respectively. On the contrary, 3.65% and 3.2% of rural households and 6.8% and 7.18% of urban households experienced severe food insecurity from the first to the sixth round, respectively. Most households have maintained their food security in urban areas than rural residents. However, the number of food secure households was gradually reduced from Round-1 to Round-6. Besides, REM output indicates that access to financial services, farm income, wage employment, income from property, investment, and savings, and NGO assistance negatively affected household's food insecurity. Whereas government support showed a positive association with households' food insecurity. Based on the findings, we recommend that households should adopt the behavior of enhancing and diversifying their sources of income, and the government also emphasize the establishment of national social security services by taking experience from NGOs’ emergency response mechanisms.