Household Resilience to Exogenous Shocks: Evidence from Malawi

Abstract

This paper uses survey data from 2,666 households in Malawi to examine the effect of household baseline characteristics on household resilience to exogenous shocks. I classify households into four groups depending on their inherent vulnerability and nurtured and/or built resilience using the approach from Briguglio et al. (2009). A household is resilient if it maintains food security after being faced with exogenous shocks or if it moves from being food insecure to being food secure after it is faced with exogenous shocks. Results from a logistic model suggest that having diversified income sources, having more productive assets, and having access to infrastructure such as electricity is important for household resilience. However, the majority of households in Malawi fall into the promising category, meaning the households have less diversified income sources, own no or few productive assets, and do not have access to non-agricultural employment. Although households in Malawi have varying levels of inherent vulnerability, the majority of these households have not built their resilience and appear to be trapped in the status quo.