Household shocks, infrastructural investments, food and nutrition security linkages in Malawi

Ending extreme hunger requires interaction of both household and community level infrastructural investments. When communities and households are capital infrastructure constrained, effects of extreme events such as droughts can fetter consumption growth and food security. This paper assesses the impact of household shocks on daily per capita food consumption in Malawi. Secondly, the study assesses the impact of community level public infrastructural investment on household food security. The study uses fixed effects regression combined with propensity score matching techniques on a Malawian panel data collected between 2010 and 2016. The study uses three indicators for food security namely food consumption expenditure, the Berry Index of dietary variety and number of days a household went without food. To measure idiosyncratic and covariate shocks, self-reported survey and high-resolution weather station-based data used. To measure infrastructure, survey data, triangulated with remote sensed night time lights, were used to construct an infrastructure index. Results show that while a standard deviation deficit in the one to three-month interval drought reduces consumption by over 80%, access to infrastructure increased consumption by a factor of two during shocks.