COVID-19, Household Resilience, and Rural Food Systems: Evidence from Southern and Eastern Africa

Resilience offers a useful lens for studying how human well-being and agri-food systems absorb and recover from a range of shocks and stressors, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond the direct effects of observable shocks to the mechanisms that shape their impacts can guide our understanding of COVID-19 and leverage findings from the pandemic to better understand resilience to future shocks. We develop a conceptual framework for the multiple paths through which observed shocks interact with systemic mechanisms to influence resilience. We illustrate this framework with reference to the pandemic and policy responses as they unfolded in three rural areas in Malawi, Madagascar, and Kenya. Consistent with this framework, we find multiple pathways through which the pandemic affected household food security and resilience. Our findings highlight that, in some settings, the direct effects—in this case severe illness and mortality from SARS-CoV-2—may impact fewer people than the indirect impacts that arise as behaviors, markets, and policies adjust. We illustrate that although COVID-19 is a new shock, its massive, broad-reaching impacts manifest through familiar stressors and uncertainties that frequently burden poor rural populations in much of the low- and middle-income world.