Coping strategies and resilience to food insecurity in urban-rural continuum of Morogoro and Iringa, Tanzania

Abstract

This study assessed whether food access insecurity strategies employed by households are similar along the urban rural continuum. Equally, the study determined whether the above mentioned strategies contribute to building households’ resilience to food access insecurity. A cross sectional research design was employed whereby a sample of 279 households was drawn using a Geographic Information System (GIS) based simple random. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire and were analysed mainly descriptively. Results show that the surveyed households use a number of coping strategies most of which vary significantly from one spatial entity to another. Also, findings revealed that these strategies do not improve households’ resilience to food access insecurity because they erode household’s own resilience. It is concluded that food access insecurity coping strategies vary significantly among households located in urban, peri urban and rural settings. Additionally, the surveyed households employ mainly reactive strategies, which may not be considered as proper in the realm of resilience building. It is recommended that poor households should be supported to diversify their income generating activities so as to be able to employ resilient building strategies when they experience food shortages.