Livelihood Strategies and Household Resilience to Food Insecurity: The Case of Niger

Transcription

1 Livelihood Strategies and Household Resilience to Food Insecurity: The Case of Niger Ruben DJOGBENOU ENSEA Abidjan June,

2 Resilience, food insecurity 2 Abstract Niger is a landlocked West African country where food insecurity is a major issue. The country has been subject to many food crisis over time and actions have been set up to cope with food insecurity in the country. The concept of resilience raised in the literature but little applications have been made in the context of food insecurity. To our knowledge, no study focused on the measurement of resilience to food insecurity in the context of Niger. This paper contributes to the literature as it uses a quantitative approach to measure the level of resilience to food insecurity in the case of Niger. The data are drawn from the Niger National Survey on Living Conditions and Agriculture The findings show that the less resilient households are the poor agricultural households (-0,00058) and the nomadic cattle-breeders households (-0,00069). The results also show high inequalities in the distribution of the resilience index and appeal to some policy measures to facilitate the access to basic social services to the less resilient households. Key Words: Niger, Livelihood strategy, Resilience, food insecurity. JEL Classification: Q12, Q18, I32, I38.

3 Resilience, food insecurity 3 1 Introduction 1.1 Problem Niger is a landlocked West African country of 16 million people. According to the World Bank, the population of Niger grows at the rate of 3.3% per year, and is ranked among the fastest growing countries in the world in terms of population. That rapid population growth acts as vector, among others, of the spreading of poverty in the country. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), nearly 63% of the total population lives below the poverty line and 34% lives in extreme poverty. This picture is even worse in rural spaces. In fact, 66% of the population lives under the poverty line and 36% in extreme poverty. The recent political instability doubled with high inequalities, weak infrastructure and extreme weather conditions had exacerbated poverty in the country. The driving sector of the economic performance of Niger is Agriculture. According to the World Food Program, almost 82% of the population of the country make a living with farming activities. Since the early 2000, Niger has been hit with negative agricultural and weather events. In , Niger has suffered from the regional equipments depletion doubled with the price inflation. Immediately after, in , there was a severe drought and locust invasion that prompted a severe food security crisis. Only two years after, in this general instability, Niger has been hit by the increase of the prices of foodstuffs at the regional level. Recently in , Niger faced a pastoral crisis with the increase of prices. This was due to poor harvests along with unpredicted flooding that naturally led to a severe food security crisis that affected around 3 million people in both urban and rural spaces. In the Sahel region faced a severe crisis coupled with general political instability in the region. In line with that, poor harvests in 2011 resulted in cereal deficits that prompted 20% of the population to fall into food insecurity in This sad picture of apparent successive food crisis contributed to the high level of malnutrition rates in the country. According to the World Food Program, around 10% of the children under 5 suffer from acute malnutrition and a total of 44% suffer from chronic malnutrition. It appears that

4 Resilience, food insecurity 4 food insecurity is a tough concern and a topical issue in Niger. In the literature, food security has become a widely discussed issue. Recently, focus has been made on the various mechanisms households could use to cope with economic shocks that affect their food security. Actually, the coping strategy of households depends on their capabilities, their assets (which include material and social resources) as well as the different activities they develop (Alinovi and al., 2010). Dercon and Krishman (1996) add that household livelihood strategy is also part of the coping strategy of households. For them, household belonging to different socioeconomic groups have different strategies to earn their own living. These differences in response ensures different levels of resilience to food insecurity. In order to bring a contribution to the existing literature, this study investigates the livelihood strategies and Household Resilience to food insecurity in Niger as it becomes important that policymakers take that fact into account 1 while implementing their food strategies. In this framework, the core assumption we make is that households belonging to different socioeconomic groups (small farmer households versus non-farmer household for instance) require different interventions. Consistent with this assumption, this study intends to reply to following three main research questions. Is there any structure in the grouping of households in Niger? What is the level of resilience to food insecurity in each livelihood groups? What are the policy implications for empowering households? 1.2 Objectives In this paper, we give focus to identifying the major determinants of the livelihood strategy in Niger. Actually this is crucial for improving the response mechanisms related to food insecurity and poverty in Niger. More specifically, firstly we develop a cluster analysis to determine the structure of households in Niger. This cluster analysis allows us to build up livelihood strategy groups in Niger households. Secondly we build a resilience index by livelihood strategy groups to measure the level of resilience to food 1 For instance, in Niger, the International Fund for Agricultural Development works to improve food and nutrition security in rural households and to boost the resilience of local communities.

5 Resilience, food insecurity 5 insecurity in Niger. 1.3 Contribution Many empirical studies have focused on the measurement of resilience in various contexts. But to our knowledge, in the case of Niger, no study investigated the households resilience to food insecurity. As food insecurity is a real issue in Niger, our study is a major contribution to the comprehension of that resilience aspect of food insecurity in Niger. From another perspective, this study is policy-relevant since it enlightens the efforts authorities have to do in order to cope with food insecurity in Niger. The remainder of the paper is organized as follow. Section 2 explores the existent literature on resilience to food insecurity. Section 3 presents the methodology adopted to compute the resilience index in the case of Niger. Section 4 shows the main results. Conclusions and policy implications are presented in section 5. 2 Literature Review The purpose of this chapter is to present the theory on resilience. The literature on the concept is very broad and diverse. We intend to give a short summary on the theoretical considerations on the concept of resilience. Resilience comes from the Latin resilientia used in metallurgy, to reflect the ability of a metal to return to its initial state after a shock or a continuous pressure. Etymologically, resilience means therefore withstand and bounce in front of a significant and persistent adversity. Originally, resilience is a physical concept, adapted to social sciences, including psychology and economics. Not many studies focus on quantitative measures of households resilience to food insecurity. Figure 1 shows a short synthesis of studies on the subject.

6 Resilience, food insecurity 6 Figure 1: Empirical Approaches to Resilience Measurement Source: Ciani and Romano (2014) In the literature, the main issue is that resilience is not directly observable. For the purpose, in general we identify two procedures to handle the problem. Alinovi and al. (2008, 2010) suggest a strategy in which resilience is modeled as a multidimensional latent variable. They use data from the Kenya integrated household budget survey. They included six (6) various components: Social safety nets, Access to public services Assets Income and food access Stability and Adaptive capacity In practice, all those components are treated as latent variables, because they are not directly observable. Thus, Alinovi and al. (2008, 2010) suggest a two-stage process to measure resilience to food insecurity (figure 3).

7 Resilience, food insecurity 7 Figure 2: Household Resilience Index Estimation Procedure Source: Alinovi and al. (2010) In the first stage some observed variables (drawn from the survey data) are used to estimate a first set of latent variables using a factor analysis. Then the latent variables computed are used to compute a resilience index through the same technique. Alinovi et al. (2010) perform a cluster analysis to classify the population in six subgroups corresponding to six livelihood strategies before running the computation of the resilience index. So to speak, there are able to highlight the differences in livelihood groups corresponding to different resilience levels and resilience building mechanisms. From an other perspective, Carter and al. (2006) and Keil and al. (2008) suggest to used an observable variable as a proxy of resilience 2. In fact Keil and al. (2008) measured resilience of Indonesian farmers to ENSO-related drought. They measured resilience as the observed degree of drought-induced expenditure reductions for basic necessities. In that framework, the absolute value of negative variations is supposed to be negatively correlated with resilience: a fully resilient household is expected to record null variations of basic consumption. They use Principal Component Analysis to aggregate the variables that describe consumption. In their analysis, the first principal component is extracted and used to compute the scores. Then they specify a model to identify the determinants of resilience. However, as we stated earlier, the fact that resilience is a complex phenomenon makes the proxy-based approach too simple to measure it. For that reason and consistent with Ciani and Romano (2014), we adopt the ap- 2 this is actually the most used approach to measure resilience

8 Resilience, food insecurity 8 proach of Alinovi and al (2010). 3 Methodology Our methodology is built on Alinovi and al. (2010). Using a Cluster Analysis, we first identify the livelihood strategy of households in Niger. The objective of the cluster analysis is to assign households to groups identified as coping strategy options against food insecurity. In our case, we adopt the hierarchical cluster analysis to group the households of our sample data. After building the livelihood strategies, we built the resilience to food insecurity index based on a two-stage factor analysis: the Multiple Factor Analysis. At the first stage we perform various factor analysis on the identified dimensions of the household resilience to food insecurity. These factor analysis allow us to compute some sub-index (I Gi ) (1 i K) representing the K components (latent variables) of the resilience index. At the second stage we use a factor analysis again to compute the resilience index. The resilience index we compute has 10 components: Access to basic services Durable Goods House Characteristics Adaptive Capacity Physical Connectivity Food security Agricultural Assets Durable Assets value Connectivity Assets value

9 Resilience, food insecurity 9 Economics and demographics The functional form of our Resilience Index, denoted RI is: RI = K k=1 λ ki Gk K k=1 λ k (1) In equation(1), λ k is the weight of the component k and is drawn from the factor loadings and the eigenvalues resulting from the Multiple Factor Analysis and I Gk is the sub index (latent variable) relative to the the component k. The normalized resilience index (Norm RI )is obtained by the following: Norm RI = RI (min RI l ) l=1,...,n (max RI l ) l=1,...,n (min RI l ) l=1,...,n (2) Where N is the number of households in our sample. 3.1 Data and sources The data are drawn from the Niger National Survey on Living Conditions and Agriculture The ECVM/A is an integrated multi-topic household survey done for the purpose of evaluating poverty and living conditions in Niger. This type of survey is regularly done in Niger. The most two recent surveys were the QUIBB (Questionnaire des Indicateurs de base du Bien-être) in 2005 and the ENBC (Enquête Nationale sur le Budget et la Consommation des Ménages) in 2007/08. This survey was implemented by the National Institute of Statistics (Institut National de la Statistique - INS) with technical and financial assistance from the World Bank. The survey covers a sample of 3,968 households with 1,538 in urban areas and 2,430 in rural areas. The sample was drawn using a stratified two-stage sampling, and to cover urban areas (Niamey, Other urban) in two strata and all rural agro-ecological zones (Agricultural, Agro-pastoral, Pastoral) in three strata. In the first stage of the sampling, 270 enumeration areas (EA) were drawn among the nearly 10,000 EAs and at the second stage, 12 or 18 households were drawn from each EA respectively in urban and rural areas. Data collection was organized in two visits, a post-planting

10 Resilience, food insecurity 10 visit from mid-july to mid-september 2011 and a post-harvest visit in November and December Three questionnaires were designed to collect a range of information on households, their farms and the communities in which they live. For the household questionnaire, the data collected concerned the household roster, health, education, employment, non-farm enterprises, housing, non-labor income and food and non-food consumption. The community questionnaire is dedicated to information on access to services and market prices. As for the agriculture questionnaire, it is designed to collect data on access to land, inputs used (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), labor (household and hired labor), equipment, production, marketing and farm income, and extensive data on livestock. For the purpose of our analysis, we concentrate on the Household heads and reduce the sample to 3578 households. The variables used to identify the livelihood strategies are: the household head demographic characteristics (age, gender, marital status, branch, socioeconomic group, industry, socio professional category,etc.), the region, the food expenditures, the household size, the agricultural status, etc. Their descriptive statistics are presented in Annex 1. 4 Results 4.1 Livelihood groups Our analysis identifies four (4) livelihood strategies groups in Niger households:

11 Resilience, food insecurity 11 Figure 3: Livelihood strategy groups in Niger The Independent sedentary households (21.83%): We note that 98.82% of household head in independent agriculture belong to this livelihood strategy. Over 90% of Artisans and traders belong to this group % of household living in Niamey are in this group. We also note that 98.89% of household in this livelihood strategy are sedentary, 91.91% household head in this group hold an individual enterprise and 87.89% of household heads are in a permanent employment. Household heads of this group are in average 44 years old and the average size of households is 5. The richest non agricultural salaried households (5.80%): In this livelihood strategy, 83.29% of household are in the 5th quintile of welfare % of those of work in health and education sectors are in this group. Household heads of this group are in average 43 years old and the average size of households is 5. The nomadic cattle-breeders households (5.11%): 84% of the nomad household and 85.13% of the cattle breeders belong to this livelihood group % of household in this livlihood strategy are in rural areas. Household heads of this group are in average 45 years old and the average size of households is 6. The poor agricultural households (67.26): 96% of agriculture households are in this livelihood strategy (most of them being small farmers) % of temporary household head workers are in this group. Over 80% of agro-pastoral and pastoral households are in this livelihood strategy % of the poorest households are

12 Resilience, food insecurity 12 in this group % of the household heads of this group have the primary educational level % of the rural households are in this group. Household heads of this group are in average 44 years old and the average size of households is 7. The distribution of livelihood strategy groups differ across Niger regions (table 1). For exemple, Cattle-breeder households are mostly concentrated in Agadez region (53.60%), while Independent sedentary are mostly concentrated in Urban areas (46.13%). The distribution of Poor agricultural household is quite uniform across regions. This shows the importance of agricultural activities in Niger.

13 Resilience, food insecurity 13 Table 1: Distribution of Livelihood Strategy Groups Across Niger Regions (%) Livelihood Strategy Groups Agadez Diffa Dosso Maradi Tahoua Tillabéri Zinder Urban Region Total Independent sedentary Richest non agricultural salaried Nomadic cattle-breeders Poor agricultural Total s

14 Resilience, food insecurity 14 In table 2, we show the distribution of livelihood strategy groups within Niger regions.

15 Resilience, food insecurity 15 Table 2: Distribution of Livelihood Strategy Groups Within Niger Regions (%) Livelihood Strategy Groups Agadez Diffa Dosso Maradi Tahoua Tillabéri Zinder Urban Region Total Independent sedentary Richest non agricultural salaried Nomadic cattle-breeders Poor agricultural Total s

16 Resilience, food insecurity 16 It appears that the largest share of Cattle-Breeders can be found in Agadez region (59.69%), the largest of Poor farming households is found in Tillaberi region (84.20%) and the largest share of independent sedentary and non agricultural salaried is found in Urban areas (63.87% and 31.10% respectively). 4.2 Resilience index In this section we show the results for the resilience index. Details on the sub indexes are reported in Annex 2. Our resilience index is built on 10 components, each representing one dimension of the household resilience to food insecurity. For purpose of comparisons, we compute the difference between each livelihood group index and the overall resilience index for Niger (figure 4). The results show that the the richest non agricultural salaried households are the most resilient (0,0022), followed by the independent sedentary households (0,00054). The less resilient households are the poor agricultural households (-0,00058) and the nomadic cattle-breeders households (-0,00069). Table 3: Resilience Index per Livelihood Strategy Group Livelihood Strategy Groups Resilience Index Independent sedentary Richest non agricultural salaried Nomadic cattle-breeders Poor agricultural Niger s

17 Resilience, food insecurity 17 Figure 4: Resilience by Livelihood Strategy Group In Niger In table 4, we show the value of the sub-indexes of the resilience index by livelihood strategy group.

18 Resilience, food insecurity 18 Table 4: Sub Indexes by Livelihood strategy group Sub Index Independent sedentary Richest non agricultural salaried Nomadic cattle-breeders Poor agricultural Access to basic services Durable Goods House Characteristics Adaptive Capacity Physical Connectivity Food security Agricultural Assets Durable Assets value Connectivity Assets value Economics and demographics

19 Resilience, food insecurity 19 For instance it appears that access to water, electricity and other basic social services is a tough issue for the less two resilient livelihood strategy groups, namely the Nomadic cattle-breeders and the poor agricultural households. Figure 5 shows the distribution of the resilience index by agroecological zone. It is clear that Niamey households are the most resilient of all (0.0032). The less resilient of the group are Agropastoral households. Figure 5: Resilience by agroecological zone In Niger Regarding gender issues, we show in figure 6 the distribution of our resilience index by household head gender.it appears that households headed by male (0,0009) are more resilient than those headed by female (0,0002). This raises awareness on the importance to strengthen gender-base action in order to improve the resilience of households headed by females.

20 Resilience, food insecurity 20 Figure 6: Resilience by Household head gender In Niger Now we analyze the inequalities issues in terms of resilience of livelihood strategy group in Niger. The percentile indexes for Niger resilience index show great inequalities within households. Table 5: Percentile Ratios p90/p10 p90/p50 p10/p50 p75/p It appears that 10% most resilient households are 43 times more resilient than the 10% less resilient ones showing a very high level of inequality in the distribution of the resilience index in Niger. To confirm such a result, we compute the Gini index of the distribution of the resilience index. It appears that the Gini of the resilience index is very high (Table 6). The inequality is very high in the different livelihood strategy groups as well. Table 6: Gini of the Resilience Index by Livelihood strategy group Livelihood Strategy Groups Gini Independent sedentary Richest non agricultural salaried Nomadic cattle-breeders Poor agricultural Niger

21 Resilience, food insecurity 21 5 Conclusion and policy implications This study gave focus to household resilience to food insecurity in Niger. For the purpose, a cluster analysis double with a Multiple Factor Analysis has been conducted. The objective of the cluster approach was to identify livelihood strategy groups with Nigerien households. The resilience index estimates show significant differences across region and identified livelihood strategy groups. The leading findings show that the cattle-breeders households are the less resilient in Niger and that households led by women are less resilient than those led by men. As policy implication, it is suggested to improve the access to basics services for cattle-breeders and to strengthen the gender-base policy in order to empower women and to make them more resilient to food insecurity. Some further investigation may deepen the gender disparities in household resilience to food insecurity.

22 Resilience, food insecurity References I [1] Alinovi, L., Erdgin, M. and Donato, R. Towards the measurement of household resilience to food insecurity: Applying a model to palestinian household data. In R. Sibrian (ed. 2008), Deriving Food Security Information From National Household Budget Surveys. Experiences, Achievement, Challenges, Rome: FAO, pages , [2] Alinovi, L., D Errico, M., Erdgin, M. and Donato, R. Livelihoods strategies and household resilience to food insecurity: An empirical analysis to kenya. European Report On Development, [3] Carter M.R., Little P.D., Mogues T., and Negatu W. Shocks, sensitivity and resilience: Tracking the economic impacts of environmental disaster on assets in ethiopia and honduras. DSGD Discussion Paper, No 32, Washington D.C.: IFPRI., [4] Ciani, F., and Romano, D. Testing for household resilience to food insecurity: Evidence from nicaragua. University of Florence, Department of Economics and Management, [5] Dercon, S., and Krishnan, P. Income portfolios in rural ethiopia and tanzania: Choices and constraints. Journal of Development Studies, (32(6)):850 75, [6] Keil A., Zeller M., Wida A., Sanim B. and Birner R. What determines farmers resilience towards enso related drought? an empirical assessment in central sulawesi, indonesia. Climate Change, (86): , 2008.

23 Resilience, food insecurity 6 Annex II 6.1 Annex 1: Descriptive statistics of the variables used for the cluster analysis Figure 7: Marital Status of the Household Head Figure 8: Lifestyle of the household

24 Resilience, food insecurity III Figure 9: Socio Professional category of the household head Figure 10: Status of the Household head

25 Resilience, food insecurity IV Figure 11: Dwelling type of the household Figure 12: Agroecological zone

26 Resilience, food insecurity V Figure 13: Gender of Household head Figure 14: Agricultural status of the household

27 Resilience, food insecurity VI Table 7: Corralation with Factors Variables Mean Standard Deviation Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4 Factor 5 mainsalary , , hhsize fieldow parcow hage dalim , , dnali , , dtot , ,

28 Resilience, food insecurity VII 6.2 Annex 2: Results of the sub indexes construction Eigenvalues Table 8: Access to basic services Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 9: Durable Goods Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 10: House Characterisics Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative

29 Resilience, food insecurity VIII Table 11: Adaptive Capacity Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 12: Physical Connectivity Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 13: Food Security Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 14: Agricultural Assets Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative

30 Resilience, food insecurity IX Table 15: Durable Assets value Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 16: Connectivity Assets value Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative Table 17: Economics and demographics Number Eigenvalue Percent Cumulative