Aspirations and food security in rural Ethiopia

Despite some improvements in recent years, poverty and food insecurity remain widespread and the main challenges in Ethiopia. Much of the empirical literature focuses on identifying the resource-related constraints for farmers to achieve food security and move out of poverty, with little attention paid to ‘internal’ or psychological factors such as aspirations. Using individual and household data collected in rural Ethiopia, we examined if aspirations were strongly associated with well-being outcomes, in our case food security, as posited in the theoretical framework of aspirations failure. We found that aspirations of the household head were positively and strongly associated with various triangulating measures of household food security including per-capita calorie consumption, the food consumption score (FCS), the household dietary diversity score (HDDS), and negatively associated with the household food insecurity access scale (HFIAS). In contrast, results suggest that the aspirations of the spouse of the household head are negatively associated with per-capita calorie consumption and FCS. We discuss the channels through which aspirations may affect food security and the avenues for future research.