Assessing the impact of corona virus (Covid-19) on rural household food security in South-western Nigeria: A Gender-household head Perspective
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Date
2020
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Abstract
Actions to minimize the spread of the COVID-19 (self-isolation, lockdown, restaurant closing, etc.) have an impact on food securityand nutrition, and the disease itself is influencing food production and distributionespecially among rural households. This study therefore, assesses the impact of COVID-19 on rural household food security in South-western Nigeria by gender. Five indices of household food security developed by international agencies were adopted with little modification to suit this study. These indices include measures of “food consumption score,” “household dietary diversity score,” “coping strategies index,” the “household food insecurity access scale,” and “months of adequate household food provisioning.”A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 540 respondents for the study. Data were collected through structured questionnaire. Collected data were analysed using frequency counts, percentages, mean, standard deviation, and food securityindex, while independent sample t-test demonstrated the existing gender gap’s level of food security and PearsonProduct Moment Correlationwasused to assess degree and direction of linear relationship between the composite FSI index and each classical indicators of food security.Overall results indicate that male headed householdsare more food secure with food security index (0.5519)compared to their female headed household counterparts with an index of 0.3453.Findings show that 48.8 and 33.9% of the male and female headed household were food secure by all the indicators and more than half (51.2 and 66.1%) of them respectively failedto meet all the required indices of food security and thus we categorized them food insecure. The result showed that there was positiveand significantcorrelation of indicators with food security index in the two categories of household heads at 1% and 5% level.It is concluded that the impact of COVID-19 is felt more in female headed households compared to their male counterpart. This study recommends household based COVID-19 education and enlightenment campaign by agricultural and health extension workers with view to bridge gender gap especially among the female headed households is required. Rural household should be given necessary financial support interms of affordable loans, so that they can flexibly and resiliently respond to the threats posed byCOVID-19.