Challenges of income diversification and food security in Northern rural Ghana

Abstract

The relationship between income diversification and food security gained considerable attention in the academic literature in the last two decades. Smallholder farmers undertake income diversification activities to ensure improved food security amidst changing patterns of climate and rural socio-demographics. Understanding the challenges of smallholder farmers in income diversification strategies is critical to assessing the effectiveness of food security measures in savannah regions threatened by weather variability and environmental shocks. This study aims to shed light on the challenges of income diversification in Northern rural Ghana and to add to the growing body of research seeking to understand the challenges of income diversification and its link to the food security status of smallholder farmers in the deprived context of rural Africa. By exploiting a unique sample of 500 agricultural households in rural Ghana, we show that income diversification and the food security status of smallholders are positively related to both food access and nutritional diversity. Our results show that income diversification played a significant role in improving food access and dietary consumption. Highly diversified households were more likely to report being food secure as higher income diversification translated into higher incomes and food security. The single most important factor which stood out as an explanatory variable for food security in Northern rural Ghana was spousal incomes generated from diversification. Spousal incomes accounted for (29.2%) of the share of total household incomes used to purchase food for farm families in distress seasons. The findings support the use of spousal income diversification pathways as a means of reducing the negative impacts of food insecurity in the Yendi and Bimbilla Municipalities of the Northern Region. The study highlights the need for Ghana’s economic policy frameworks to address the following three cardinal challenges of income diversification : (1) poor access to start-up capital or funds, (2) poor condition of infrastructure, and (3) high costs of transportation, directly linked to the underdevelopment of Northern Ghana.