COVID-19 and Food Security in Ethiopia : Do Social Protection Programs Protect?
This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's flagship social protection program, the Productive Safety Net Program on the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food and nutrition security of households, mothers, and children. The ana...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/917941605204533596/COVID-19-and-Food-Security-in-Ethiopia-Do-Social-Protection-Programs-Protect http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34794 |
| Summary: | This paper assesses the impact of
Ethiopia's flagship social protection program, the
Productive Safety Net Program on the adverse impacts of the
COVID-19 pandemic on the food and nutrition security of
households, mothers, and children. The analysis uses
pre-pandemic, in-person household survey data and a
post-pandemic phone survey. Two-thirds of the respondents
reported that their incomes had fallen after the pandemic
began, and almost half reported that their ability to
satisfy their food needs had worsened. Employing a household
fixed effects difference-in-difference approach, the study
finds that household food insecurity increased by 11.7
percentage points and the size of the food gap by 0.47
months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic.
Participation in the Productive Safety Net Program offsets
virtually all of this adverse change -- the likelihood of
becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage
points for Productive Safety Net Program households and the
duration of the food gap increased by only 0.13 month. The
protective role of the program is greater for poorer
households and those living in remote areas. The results are
robust to various definitions of program participation,
different estimators, and different ways of accounting for
the non-randomness of mobile phone ownership. Productive
Safety Net Program participants were less likely to reduce
expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage
points and less likely to reduce expenditures on
agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points. By contrast,
mothers' and children's diets changed little,
despite some changes in the composition of diets, with
consumption of animal source foods declining significantly. |
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