Household Resilience, and Rural Food Systems: Evidence from Southern and Eastern Africa
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Abstract
Resilience offers a useful lens for studying how human well-being and the systems on
which it depends can absorb and recover from a range of shocks and stressors, including
events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond the direct effects of observable
shocks and individual or household resilience capacities to the meso-level mechanisms
that shape impacts on communities, households, and individuals can both guide our
understanding of COVID-19 impacts and help leverage findings from the pandemic
context to better understand resilience to other food systems shocks, past, present, and
future. We develop a conceptual framework for the multiple paths through which
observed, exogenous shocks interact with systemic, endogenous mechanisms to
influence the resilience of household well-being and supporting food systems. We
illustrate this framework with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic and policy
responses as they unfolded in three rural study areas in Malawi, Madagascar, and
Kenya. Consistent with this framework, we find multiple pathways through which the
pandemic shock affected household food security and resilience. Our findings highlight
that in some settings, at some points in the multi-stressor trajectory of a shock, the
more serious, direct effects – in this case, severe illness and mortality from SARS-CoV-2
– may impact far fewer people than do the substantive, indirect impacts that arise as
behaviors, markets, and policies adjust to the shock. These adjustments are necessarily
correlated and elicit varied household coping responses. We illustrate the degree to which,
from the point of view of rural food systems and households, COVID-19 is a new shock but its
massive, broad-reaching impacts manifest through familiar stressors and uncertainties that
frequently burden poor rural populations in much of the lowand middle-income world.
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2021-09
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Food Security; Household Shocks; Kenya; Madagascar; Malawi; Resilence
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