Evaluation of rural households’ food security through resilience indicators in West Shoa, Ethiopia

Persistent hunger, widespread undernourishment and frequent famine affect the food security situations. The major objective of this research is to evaluate rural households’ food security using resilience indicators. Households were classified into three wealth groups as poor (<1725Kcal), medium (1725kcal to 3250kcal) and rich (> 3250kcal). The classification produces reasonable comparisons based on measures of asset ownership and characteristics. Results indicate that the daily average kcal per day per AE for the poor is 1183.949kcal and for the rich is 4561.767 kcal. Sanitation facility of the poor is 25% less than that of the rich. The underlying factors to household food security system to sustain, seven components of resilience were taken into account to measure households’ capability to absorb the negative effects of unpredictable shocks. Each building block was separately estimated using different multivariate techniques, which becomes covariates in estimation of resilience index. Except access to public services, which is negatively correlated with other variables, all are positively correlated to resilience. This can be imagined given that weak APS increases when households become poorer. In the second factor, APS becomes positive, which shows that it is a positive characteristic of resilience. Adaptive capacity is positive in the first factor and negative in the second factor. It shows the likely that when a household becomes poor, put the poor in difficulty to acquire resources that they did not have before. The third factor triggers hidden information of the resilience blocks. From all the building blocks under the third factor, stability and adaptive capacity are positive, which likely tells common story in terms of food security situations.