Dietary Diversity as a Household Food Security Indicator

The report "Dietary Diversity as a Household Food Security Indicator" is part of a series of FANTA activities aimed at developing user-friendly, cost-effective approaches to measuring changes in dietary quantity and quality and feeding behaviors at both the household and individual levels.

Dietary diversity, defined as the number of unique foods consumed over a given period of time, appears to show promise as a means of measuring food security and monitoring changes, particularly when resources for such measurement are scarce.

For the study, FANTA's subcontractor, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), analyzed ten household data sets (collected in India, Mozambique, Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya and the Philippines) to assess whether dietary diversity can be used as a tool in evaluating the efficacy of food security interventions. The study validated the dietary diversity indicator as a measure of access to food (per capita expenditures) and a measure of consumption (caloric availability at the household level).

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