The Household Food Security Implications of Disrupted Access to Basic Services in Five Cities in the Global South

Abstract

COVID-19 has caused significant disruptions regarding the extent to which households can access basic services and resources in cities around the world. Previous studies have indicated a predictive relationship between the consistency of resource access and food access among urban households. These investigations, however, have predominantly been isolated to Southern Africa and have not accounted for other dimensions of food security. To test whether these results are observable outside Southern Africa, and with a more multidimensional measure of food security, this investigation proposes a method for building an index of urban household food access, utilization and stability. The scores for the constructed index are then compared across household survey samples collected from five cities in the Global South. The investigation then assesses the predictive relationship between the consistency of household resource access and this more multidimensional index of food insecurity. While the general trend of inconsistent resource access predicting food insecurity is confirmed, there are geographic differences in the strength and quality of this relationship. These findings suggest that the resource access disruptions inflicted by COVID-19 will likely have a heterogeneous impact on urban food security dependent upon the affected resource and the city in which a given household resides.