(African Economic Research Consortium, 2024-04-09) Bwalya, Richard; Chitalu, M. Chama-Chiliba
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been growing concerns about the impact of the pandemic on household food security (Nguyen et al., 2021; Cable et al., 2021; and Paslakis et al., 2020). Available studies show that economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is proportionately affect members of the society, depending on factors such as socio-economic status, livelihood strategies, and access to markets. However, though informative, these studies tend to be based on small sample sizes, limited geographical coverage or both, and thus less useful for informing the design of effective recovery strategies that lead to more resilient national food systems (Bene et al. 2021). As a contribution to addressing this information gap, this paper investigated changes in household food security and its drivers in Zambia between the pre pandemic and COVID-19 periods, with the objective of identifying significant drivers of food security and understand how they changed during the pandemic.