Food inflation, household food insecurity, and coping strategies in urban Ethiopia

Food inflation is an increasingly important threat to dietary quality and household resilience in market-dependent urban settings. This mixed-methods study examined how food inflation, household socioeconomic characteristics, institutional support, and coping behaviour shape two food-security outcomes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the FCS and the CSI. A cross-sectional survey of 624 households was conducted across 11 sub-cities between October and December 2024 and was complemented by key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and market-vendor interviews. Descriptive and econometric results show that most households maintained acceptable food consumption, but this apparent stability concealed substantial dietary substitution and coping pressure. Education, employment, wealth, food expenditure, and access to finance were positively associated with FCS, whereas participation in the urban productive safety net and consumer associations was associated with lower FCS, suggesting selection into support programmes among highly vulnerable households and possible inadequacy of transfers under inflation. CSI results indicate that younger household heads, larger households, unstable employment, and limited assets were more likely to adopt coping responses such as purchasing cheaper foods, reducing dietary diversity, borrowing, or skipping meals. Inflation perception was widespread but was not consistently significant in multivariable models, indicating that coping behaviour was driven more by real purchasing-power constraints and institutional buffers than by perception alone. Informal social protection, especially Idir , emerged as an important community-level buffer. The findings show that urban food insecurity under inflation is best understood through the combined lens of dietary quality and coping intensity. Policy responses should prioritize inflation-sensitive urban safety nets, labour-market protection, affordable credit with safeguards, school feeding, health insurance, and formal recognition of community-based support mechanisms.