Remittances, shocks, and household resilience in Somalia: Evidence from welfare, food security, and coping strategies

Households in fragile and conflict-affected settings face recurrent climatic, economic, and market-related shocks that can threaten welfare and intensify vulnerability. Remittances represent an important source of private household support, but their role in moderating the relationship between shocks and welfare remains empirically uncertain, particularly in settings characterized by institutional fragility and limited formal risk-management mechanisms. This study examines the relationships among remittances, shocks, and household welfare in Somalia using nationally representative data from the 2022 Somalia Integrated Household Budget Survey (SIHBS), covering an analytical sample of 6383 households. The analysis adopts a multidimensional perspective by jointly examining real per capita expenditure, poverty, food insecurity, and negative coping. Fully adjusted interaction models are estimated using remittance receipt and remittance amount, complemented by heterogeneity analyses by shock severity and shock type and a range of robustness checks, including propensity score matching, outlier sensitivity, additional controls, nonlinear estimation, and multiple-testing adjustment. The results show that shock exposure is strongly associated with greater food insecurity and a higher probability of negative coping, while its adjusted associations with real per capita expenditure and poverty are statistically insignificant. Remittance receipt and higher remittance amounts are most consistently associated with lower food insecurity. However, the fully adjusted shock × remittance interactions are statistically insignificant across the main welfare outcomes, providing limited evidence that remittances systematically modify the marginal association between shocks and welfare. Formal heterogeneity tests likewise provide no robust evidence that remittance-related moderation differs systematically by shock severity or shock type after adjustment for multiple testing. Overall, the findings suggest that remittances are associated with more favorable food-security outcomes, including among shock-affected households, but do not establish a general or heterogeneous causal buffering effect. The study contributes evidence from a highly shock-prone and remittance-reliant fragile setting and highlights the importance of combining accessible private transfer channels with shock-responsive social protection and multidimensional vulnerability monitoring.