Harold Alderman

Abstract Child stunting in Ethiopia has persisted at alarming rates, despite enormous amounts of food aid, often procured in response to shocks. Using nationally representative data, the study finds that while harvest failure leads to child growth faltering, food aid affected child growth positively and offset the negative effects of shocks in communities that received food aid. However, many communities that experienced shocks did not receive food aid. In sum, while food aid has helped reduce child malnutrition, inflexible food aid targeting, together with endemic poverty and limited maternal education, has left the prevalence of child stunting at alarming levels.

This report introduces new estimates of food insecurity based on food acquisition data collected directly from households as part of national household expenditure surveys (HESs) conducted in 12 Sub-Saharan African countries. The report has three objectives: (1) to explore the extent and location of food insecurity across and within the countries; (2) to investigate the scientific merit of using the food data collected in HESs to measure food insecurity; and (3) to compare food insecurity estimates generated using HES data with those reported by FAO and explore the reasons for differences between the two. The overall purpose is to investigate how the data collected in HESs can be used to improve the accuracy of FAO’s estimates, which are being used to monitor the MDG hunger goal. The study is based on both diet quantity and diet quality indicators of food insecurity. The two main indicators of focus are the share of people consuming insufficient dietary energy, or the prevalence of “food energy deficiency” and the share of households with low diet diversity. The study finds these to be valid indicators of food insecurity and to be reasonably reliably measured. They are also comparable across the study countries despite differing methods of data collection.

The literature indicates mixed results regarding the impact of income and other variables on the age and gender standardized height-for-age of children. This paper uses data from Maputo, Mozambique to show that the impact of household resources or health inputs may be masked if diverse age groups are aggregated. For example, increases in household incomes affect only the nutritional status of children two years of age and older. Conversely, for younger children, but not the older ones, mother's education is a significant determinant of anthropometric measures of nutritional status. This implies that education and efforts to improve childcare practices can be targeted to mothers of younger children, but that these children will not achieve improved linear growth from income-support programs, unlike older children.

The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into four distinct pathways: i) encouraging asset accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in obtaining credit, and from information asymmetries; overcoming such failures helps households to invest into their human capital or productive assets; ii) failures in insurance markets especially in low income setting; safety nets are assisting in managing risk both ex post and ex ante; iii) safety nets are overcoming failure to create assets and other local economy complementary factors to household-level investments; iv) safety nets are shown to relax political constraints on policy. Safety nets have a dual objective of directly alleviating poverty through transfers to the poor and of triggering higher growth for the poor. However, the trade-off between the dual objectives of equity and growth is not eliminated by the potential for productive safety nets; this remains critical for designing social policies. JEL codes: