Technical Note No. 4

Dietary Diversity as a Household Food Security Indicator

Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may not capture all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to access enough food for a productive healthy life is an important indication of their level of poverty. However, obtaining detailed data on household food access- such as 24 hour recall data on food intakes - can be time consuming, expensive, and requires a high level of technical skill both in data collection and analysis.

The Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project is carrying out a set of activities aimed at developing user-friendly, cost-effective approaches to measure changes in dietary quantity and quality at the household and individual level. A recent FANTA analysis shows that dietary diversity - the number of individual foods or food groups consumed over a given period - is a good indicator of the access dimension of household food security. In addition to a summary of the analysis findings, this technical note also provides implications for food security programming.

Download Technical Note [42 kb]

Download Original Report [173 kb] Download Technical Appendix to Report [108 kb]