Mobile money, food security and coping strategies in a post-conflict and fragile context: evidence from Burundi

Jonathan Atta-Aidoo, Saidi Bizoza, Ester Cosmas Matthew and Abdulkarim Onah Saleh

Journal of Economics and Development, 2024, vol. 26, issue 4, 306-328

Abstract: Purpose - Attaining the Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) of zero hunger continues to be a challenge in most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, financial inclusion is seen as a potential pathway for reducing food insecurity among poor households. Mobile money is a financial inclusion instrument that is easily accessible to poor households and has the potential to increase the level of financial inclusion. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the determinants of mobile money adoption, its effects on household food security and the choice of coping strategies in Burundi, a post-conflict and fragile country. Design/methodology/approach - Using survey data that involved 860 households in Burundi, we adopted the Household Hunger Scale (HHS) developed under the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance Project to measure household food security. We further employ the endogenous switching regression treatment effects model for ordered outcomes and the multivariate probit model to achieve our aims. Findings - The results of our study reveal that the adoption of mobile money is influenced by factors such as gender, marital status, age, formal education, membership in a social network, area of residence and access to a tarred road network. Additionally, the food security status of a household was determined by marital status, formal education, social network membership, access to tarred roads, off-farm income, access to credit and land tenure security. We confirm that mobile money adoption has a significantly positive effect on the food security status of households with heterogeneity in gender and area of residence. We also find that mobile money adoption reduces the likelihood of households adopting consumption-related coping strategies. Practical implications - The promotion of mobile money should, therefore, be included in Burundi’s national food security policies. Originality/value - This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the effect of mobile money adoption on household food security and the choice of coping strategies in a post-conflict context.

Keywords: Food insecurity; Digital financial inclusion; Endogenous switching regression; Impact; Heterogeneous effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:jedpps:jed-10-2023-0185

DOI: 10.1108/JED-10-2023-0185

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Development is currently edited by Prof Dr Le Quoc Hoi

More articles in Journal of Economics and Development from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().