Abstract

The study assessed the strategies through which rural women coped with the menace of food insecurity in their households. It identified the consumption and livelihood coping measures and constraints to their strive for household food security. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select a total of 120 women from 10 villages from the pro-poor Ejigbo Local Government Area of Osun State. Data were collected with the aid of well-structured interview schedule and analysed with descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed the mean age and household size of the women as 41.11±9.68years and 7.39±4.342, respectively. Majority of women had to choose inexpensive food items (78.7%), reduce meals frequency (70.7%) and purchase food stock on credit, among other consumption related strategies for coping with food insecurity. More so, the women livelihood was explored to buffer the food insecurity situation through spending of their past cash savings (79.3%), reduction of social expenses (75.3%) and selling of livestock (46%), among others in a bid to raise fund to procure food stock for the household. The constraints faced include increasingly high cost of food items (83.3%), perpetually low income (72.7%) as well as poor market for farm produce, among others. The use of coping strategies to ameliorate food insecurity was found to be significantly associated with their age (r= -0.197), monthly expenditure (r= 0.160) and membership of cooperative society (r= 0.360). It was concluded that the permeation of livelihood limiting and unwholesome food consumption strategies employed by women to ameliorate food insecurity is underpinned by younger age, higher household expenditure and cooperative society membership. It was recommended that livelihood support programmes are needed to facilitate women livelihood security and well-being as a panacea to combat the scourge of food insecurity in the study area.

Key Words: Food insecurity, Poverty, Livelihood, Coping strategies