The Relative Influence of Heads of Households Educational Attainment on Households Food Insecurity and Monetary Poverty in Burkina Faso

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Although the manifestations of food insecurity are mainly suffered by the financially constrained households in times of national insecurity crises, the current definition of food insecurity as adopted during the 1996 world food summit doesn't account for its heterogeneous impact on households of various socio-economic status within nations. As a result, the concept of education and food security has received far less attention in the literature. Given the Income enabling nature of education as stipulated by human capital theory, it can be postulated that everything being equal, households with formally educated heads experience less food insecurity and poverty than those with uneducated heads. The aim here is therefore to test this claim in the case of Burkina Faso, using the 2014 National Survey on Households Living Conditions. In its design the study uses households willingness and ability to spend annually on food consumption a per-capita amount above the food poverty line of 102,040 CFA Franc to characterize household food security, and households unwillingness or inability to spend above the overall poverty line of 153,530 CFA Franc to characterize monetary In addition, the study relies not only on single equation multivariate probit and logit specifications, but also on both fully parametric and semi-parametric bivariate probit representations of food insecurity and poverty. The results show that relaxing the linearity and independence assumptions through the semi-parametric bivariate probit specification captures better the true effects of heads of households' educational attainment on households' food insecurity and poverty. In fact, compared to households headed by someone with no education, those headed by someone with a primary, secondary or higher education are respectively 19.8%, 49.7% and 118.9% less likely to experience food insecurity, and respectively 40.1%, 77.0% and 172.3% less likely to experience poverty in Burkina Faso. In addition, the experience of food insecurity and poverty are highly correlated at 92.7%, suggesting that educational policies that alleviate poverty in Burkina Faso should also impact positively food security in the country.