Determinants of Food Insecurity among Households in Addis Ababa City, Ethiopia

Even though there is long-held belief that urban populations are better off, or even favoured than rural populations, the recent food and financial crises have highlighted the problem of urban food insecurity in developing countries. Hence, the overall objective of this study was to examine the determinants of food insecurity among urban households in Addis Ababa city. To do so, both descriptive statistics and econometric analysis were employed. Descriptive statistics used Foster, Greer and Thorbeck distributional measure of food insecurity while econometric analysis used binary logistic regression model to analyze the data of a set of socio-economic variables as explanatory variables and food insecurity as independent variable. The head count index shows that 58,16 % of the total households are below the food insecurity line. The food insecurity gap and severity were 20 % and 9,4 %, respectively. The result of the logistic regression model estimate indicates that out of the 10 factors included, 6 were found to have a significant influence on the probability of being food insecure at less than 10 % significance level. The variables considered were household size, age of household head, household head education, and access to credit, household asset possession, and access to employment. Efforts should be made to improve income earning capacity of households, their education level with particular focus on vocational training, reduce household size with a view to reducing their dependency ratio and access of credit to the needy and trained people needs to be provided with proper targeting criterion.