The Boko Haram conflict and food insecurity: Does resilience capacity matter?

Drawing from a robust identication strategy and household panel data collected before and after exposure to the Boko Haram civil conict, this paper addresses the question of whether or not resilience capacity is an important factor in the mitigation of households risks of food insecurity in the presence of shocks. Under non-parametric dierence-in-dierences framework, the paper at rst identies that the shocks actively erode household food security. Ignoring the roles of resilience capacity, the basic estimates indicate that exposure to the conict is associated with signicant downward movements in all the three dimensions of food security considered. At the second, further analyses underscore resilience capacity as an active mediator of the shocks and quanties the roles of overall resilience capacity and its various pillars. However, the processes dissipate substantial amount of resilience, thereby weakening households long-run potential to withstand shocks. The results are prescriptively unchanged after adjusting operating spatial distance of exposure or switching measure of conict exposure to conict intensity represented as battle fatalities. These estimates bear out the various hypotheses of the resilience approach to sustainable development. Accordingly, the main recommendation is that conict intervention programmes focus on rebuilding resilience that might restore households ability to overcome present and future shocks.