Heterogeneous impact of household resilience on food and nutrition security: evidence from Senegal

Abstract This study investigates the heterogeneous impact of household resilience on food and nutrition security, using household-level data from Senegal. We use the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis II (RIMA-II) framework to capture household resilience capacity. We employ Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) method to account for potential endogeneity and a Dose-Response Function approach to analyze the impact of resilience on key food security indicators, namely the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), disaggregating the analysis by the gender of the household head. Our empirical results reveal that higher resilience leads to better food and nutrition security outcomes. However, the dose-response function analysis shows a positive but heterogeneous effect of Resilience intensity (RCI)) across both male and female-headed households. Female-headed households benefit substantially more from increases in resilience capacity index (RCI) in terms of food security outcomes, but they experience worse food security when resilience is very low. These findings suggest that policy measures should strengthen gender-responsive resilience-building interventions, targeting constraints faced by low-resilience households and ensuring a more equitable distribution of benefits.