Climate change and climate variability affect weather patterns and cause shifts in seasons with serious repercussions such as declining food production and productivity for communities and households in Kenya. To mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and variability, farming households have been encouraged to adopt different strategies such as new crop varieties, crop and livestock diversification, and water-harvesting technologies.

This study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of government policy interventions at different scales addressed to improve food security. Food security both at the regional and district level was investigated by deriving food balance sheets for the period 2000-2008. An empirical analysis based on a logit model was also employed to analyze household level food security status.

With the ongoing changes in climate, household food insecurity is likely to be more widespread in most small-holder and subsistence farm households in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the existence and extent of gendered household food security—or lack thereof—remains unclear.

Abstract: Gendered food security gaps between female- and male-headed households (FHHs and MHHs) can be decomposed into two sets of components: those explained by observable differences in levels of resource use, and those due to unobserved differences affecting the returns to the resources used. Employing exogenous switching ordered probit and binary probit regression models, this paper examines the gendered food security gap and its causes in rural Malawi.

Abstract: This paper explores the link between the gender of a household head and food security in rural Kenya. The results show that the food security gap between male-headed households (MHHs) and female-headed households (FHHs) is explained by their differences in observable and unobservable characteristics. FHHs’ food security status would have been higher than it is now if the returns (coefficients) on their observed characteristics had been the same as the returns on the MHHs’ characteristics.

This paper examines the impact of agriculture-related shocks on consumption patterns of rural farming households using 3 years of data from South Africa. We make two key observations.

This study examines the role of gender of the head of household on the
food security of small-scale subsistence farmers in urban and rural areas of
South Africa, using the exogenous switching treatment-effects regression
framework.

This paper assesses rural households’ decision to use improved maize varieties in Malawi and examines its impact on household welfare using a three-year household panel data.

Rising prices of fossil fuels, together with apprehension about the environmental harm created by them, have resulted in increasing efforts to search for alternative energy sources such as biofuels. Biofuels production is still a debatable issue regarding the opportunities it creates and the challenges it poses.