Recovery without resilience? A novel way to measure nutritional resilience in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Uganda
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Global Food Security
Abstract
People in fragile environments face various shocks that negatively affect their nutrition. Many governments put
policy mechanisms in place to promote recovery of households after adverse shocks; however, resilience is
difficult to measure because some apparent recovery could be the result of statistical randomness and reversion
to trends. This paper demonstrates a new approach to measuring nutritional resilience in a population. As our
starting point, we use the common definition of resilience as ‘recovery after decline’, but also require that the
degree of recovery should exceed stochastic expectations. Using maternal and child nutrition data from Nepal,
Bangladesh, and Uganda, we find that observed recovery is not always statistically significant and does not always
satisfy this definition of resilience. We identify household and community factors that are correlated with
measurable nutritional resilience, and recommend points of entry for policies designed to enhance resilience in
resource-constrained settings.
Description
Keywords
Resilience, Nutrition, Diets, Resource-constrained settings
Citation
Zaharia, S., Masters, WA, Ghosh, S., Shively, GE, Gurung, S., Manohar, S., ... & Webb, P. (2021). Recovery without resilience? A novel way to measure nutritional resilience in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Uganda. Global Food Security , 31 , 100573. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2021.100573