The Effect of Cash Transfers and Household Vulnerability on Food Insecurity in Zimbabwe

Garima Bhalla (), Sudhanshu Handa, Gustavo Angeles, David Seidenfeld and Office of Research - Innocenti Unicef

Innocenti Working Papers

Abstract: We study the impact of the Zimbabwe Harmonized Social Cash Transfer (HSCT) on household food security after 12 months of implementation. The programme has had a strong impact on a well-known food security scale – the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) – but muted impacts on food consumption expenditure. However aggregate food consumption hides dynamic activity taking place within the household where the cash is used to obtain more food from the market and rely less on food received as gifts. The cash in turn gives them greater choice in their food basket which improves diet diversity. Further investigation of the determinants of food consumption and the HFIAS shows that several dimensions of household vulnerability correlate more strongly with the HFIAS than food consumption. Labour constraints, which is a key vulnerability criterion used by the HSCT to target households, is an important predictor of the HFIAS but not food expenditure, and its effect on food security is even larger during the lean season.

Keywords: cash transfers; food resources; food security; vulnerable groups; zimbabwe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 I31 I32 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Journal Article: The effect of cash transfers and household vulnerability on food security in Zimbabwe (2018)
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