Combined impacts of health and weather shocks on welfare resilience of rural households in Uganda

Occurrence of multiple compound or cascading shocks is a common phenomenon in rural areas, and poses serious threats to food security and overall welfare resilience of rural households. Although the importance of such combined shocks for rural societies is increasingly coming to the spotlight, there is still very limited empirical research on this topic. Therefore, in this paper, we assess the combined effects of extreme weather and health shocks on food, non-food and total consumption of rural households in Uganda, using a very innovative and customized high frequency panel household survey data (6 waves, 2020-2021). The findings show that extreme weather reduced food and non-food consumption by 11-19% while food consumption and diet diversity were unaffected by health shocks. Combined effects of health shocks and weather extremes have strong heterogenous effects on different categories of rural households, with more negative effects on the poorest households. The findings also highlight substantial consumption mobility overtime among rural households, i.e. even the richest households could end up with time at the bottom categories of consumption. Group networks and access to loans were used to smoothen consumption by the poorest households, while the richer households used remittances for consumption smoothing.