Technical Note No. 4

Dietary Diversity as a Household Food Security Indicator (2002)

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 and expensive and requires a high level of technical skill.

FANTA carried 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. Project analysis has shown 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. This technical note summarizes the analysis and provides implications for food security programming.

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