Abstract:
Recent global and African food crises have raised the importance of resilience as a
determinant of the ability of households to cope with shocks and stresses that affect food
security. This article sets out to develop a measure for resilience to provide a concise tool
for measuring and monitoring food security in comparative ways across countries. It
presents the results of the development of a resilience score tested using Demographic and
Health Survey (DHS) household data for five African countries from two different time
periods per country. Cluster analysis was used to classify households into socio-economic
groups. The first index used Categorical Principal Component Analysis (CATPCA) and
the second a simple sum of assets. Both indices were able to detect changes in household
socio-economic status over the data periods in all five countries. However, the results for
the two indices were not always consistent. The simple sum method results matched the
published national Millennium Development Goal data more closely than the Categorical
Principal Component Analysis method. The simple sum of assets has potential as an
impact indictor for development programmes aimed at improving household food security
and as a national to Millennium Development Goal indicator. It provides a simple tool for
tracking resilience from data that is routinely collected through multiple in-country
surveys and available from national statistics.
