Impact of HIV/AIDS-Related Deaths on Rural Farm Households' Welfare in Zambia: Implications for Poverty Reduction Strategies

Using comprehensive rural farm household longitudinal data from Zambia, this paper measures the impacts of prime-age (PA) adult morbidity and mortality on crop production and cropping patterns, household size, livestock and non-farm income. The paper adopts and extends the counterfactual (difference-in-difference) approach by controlling for initial (pre-death) household conditions that may influence the severity of the impacts of adult mortality. In particular, the study controls for initial poverty status, landholding size, effective dependency ratios, and the gender and position of the deceased person. Moreover, the possibility that PA death in the household is endogenous is taken into account by conceptualizing the measurement of effects of prime-age adult death on rural agricultural households’ welfare as a two stage process: first, by examining the characteristics of afflicted households; and second, conditional on being afflicted, determining the effects of morbidity and mortality on indicators of household welfare both prior to and after mortality. The findings from this study provide important information that may assist governments, donors, and development planners in developing specific policies or interventions to mitigate the impacts of the disease on vulnerable households.