Estimating the level of rural household resilience to food insecurity: evidence from Rushinga Rural District in northern Zimbabwe

Abstract

Rural households in semi-arid Zimbabwe face recurrent food insecurity because their livelihoods depend heavily on climate-sensitive agriculture, limited assets, and weak rural service systems. However, household-level evidence on the dimensions that construct resilience to food insecurity in Southern Africa remains limited. The study estimates multidimensional rural household resilience to food insecurity in Rushinga District, Zimbabwe; identifies the relative contributions of eight livelihood-related resilience dimensions; and examines resilience patterns by livelihood orientation and household headship, using cross-sectional survey data from 300 households collected across three wards. The study applied a two-stage procedure informed by the multidimensional structure of the FAO-RIMA-II framework. In the first stage, observable household indicators were grouped a priori into eight theoretically informed resilience dimensions, such as assets, income and food access, social protection, access to basic services, access to natural resources, adaptive capacity, support services, and stability. PCA was used within each dimension to reduce the observed indicators into dimension-level component scores. In the second stage, the retained dimension scores were entered into a factor analysis to examine their joint structure and construct the multidimensional household resilience index. The second-order factor analysis retained three factors explaining 59.28% of the variance, with comparatively high absolute loadings for income and food access (0.891), assets (0.793), adaptive capacity (-0.777), stability (0.783), basic services (0.623) and support services (0.813). Access to natural resources did not load strongly on the retained factors, indicating a comparatively weaker contribution within the estimated multidimensional structure. Non-farming households recorded a higher mean resilience score relative to farming households, while female-headed households recorded a lower mean resilience score compared to male-headed households. The findings suggest that strengthening rural resilience to food insecurity in Zimbabwe may require a policy approach that supports productive assets, non-farm livelihood diversification, access to basic services, and gender-responsive support systems, alongside agricultural interventions.