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How specific resilience pillars mitigate the impact of drought on food security: Evidence from Uganda

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Abstract

Uganda continues to be prone to climate shocks especially drought which has adverse impact on food security. This paper studies household resilience capacities with special focus on how different resilience capacities mitigate the impact of drought on food security. The study follows the TANGO framework to identify resilience components, and two-step factor analysis to construct three resilience capacity indexes (absorptive, adaptive, and transformative) and overall resilience capacity index. To examine the mitigating role of resilience capacities, we interact resilience capacity indexes with the different measures of drought. The study employs a panel data from the Uganda National Panel Surveys (UNPS) undertaken between 2010/11 and 2018/19, spanning five waves. To minimise the bias arising from subjective self-reported drought shock, we introduce an objective measure of drought from the global SPEI database into the UNPS data. We also address attrition bias by controlling for attrition hazard estimated from the attrition function. Our analysis reveals that households in Uganda exhibit significantly low and nearly static resilience capacities. This implies majority of households in Uganda remain highly vulnerable to food insecurity in the event of severe drought. The study shows that building resilience capacities is an effective way of protecting households from such devastating situation. Whereas there are mixed results on the effectiveness of different resilience capacities in mitigating the effects of drought depending on the measure of food security and drought, decomposition of each of the three resilience capacities reveals critical aspects in each capacity. Succinctly, access to climate related information and linking social capital are very critical under adaptive capacity, infrastructure services are very key under transformative capacity, while informal safety nets are critical under absorptive capacity. Therefore, interventions that enhance households’ access to the above aspects are very important in building resilience to shocks, especially drought.

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Notes

  1. http://www.fao.org/land-water/water/drought/droughtandag/en/.

  2. https://www.who.int/health-topics/drought#.

  3. Drylands make up about 43 percent of the continent’s land surface, account for about 75 percent of the area used for agriculture, and are home to about 50 percent of the population (Raffaello & Michael, 2016).

  4. Disaster risk finance (DRF) is a component of the governements’ Third Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (NUSAF III) project, that seeks to build the resilience against shocks mainly drought of poor and vulnerable households in northern Uganda by providing income support in the form of labor-intensive public works (LIPW).

  5. https://blogs.worldbank.org/psd/building-resilience-against-drought-case-uganda.

  6. The Inter-Governmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) (2012) defined drought as “a period of abnormally dry weather, long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance”.

  7. United Nations refers to food security as “People having at all times, physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.

  8. Absorptive capacity in this sense refers to the ability to minimize exposure to shocks and stresses (ex-ante) where possible and to recover quickly when exposed (ex post).

  9. Adaptive capacity refers to the ability to adjust to changes, moderate damage and to take opportunities.

  10. Transformative capacity refers to the ability to create a new system to make conditions attainable.

  11. Assuming a months has 30 days.

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Acknowledgements

The paper is an outcome of the STAAARS+ fellowship of the Food Security Policy Research, Capacity and Influences (PRCI) program of the USAID Feed the future initiative administered by Michigan State University, Cornell University and the International Food Policy Research Institute. This research is supported by the PRCI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

    Nathan Sunday

  2. Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), Kampala, Uganda

    Rehema Kahunde & Blessing Atwine

  3. Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

    Adesoji Adelaja & Justin George

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Sunday, N., Kahunde, R., Atwine, B. et al. How specific resilience pillars mitigate the impact of drought on food security: Evidence from Uganda. Food Sec. 15, 111–131 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-022-01313-9

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