Gauging Food Insecurity Resilience Among Pastoral Communities: A Case Study of Kenya

There is increasing interest in finding alternatives to building resilience of households to food insecurity as the traditional vulnerability approach has failed to improve the ability of communities to withstand emerging shocks. Several models have been advanced along this line of thinking: among them the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) resilience model. The model has identified food resilience indicators and broadly grouped them as income, access to food and basic services, social safety nets, assets, adaptive capacity and stability. This chapter is based on a multi-stage approach study that validated the FAO food resilience model among households. It identified key relevant variables that promote food insecurity resilience among arid and semi-arid communities in general but used the Somali and Turkana communities of northern Kenya as specific cases. The study used samples comprising 300 and 360 households in Mandera and Turkana Counties, respectively. A questionnaire captured household socio-economic characteristics and data on the broad food security indicators. Principal Components Analysis identified key indicators that were useful in identifying resilient households and subsequently for computation of household resilience index. Diet diversity score, durable index and education level of household head were the three key determinants of household food resilience in arid and semi-arid settings. Efforts to build household resilience to food insecurity should, therefore, focus on increasing family incomes and literacy levels. These three indicators could be potent enough in isolation, hence targeting of non-resilient households that need humanitarian support and for also evaluating resilience building interventions among pastoral households in arid and semi-arid regions.