Robert Kolbila, a doctoral student at Mississippi State University (MSU) and native of Ghana, presented research on the Fish Innovation Lab's Fish4Zambia project at the university's recent Graduate Research Symposium. Kolbila's abstract is below, and more information about Fish4Zambia is available on the project page.
Objective: Fish4Zambia is multi-methods research for development (R4D) project funded by USAID and Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish and conducted in July 2019 among men and women engaged in fishing activities (i.e., fish value chain actors) in Zambia’s Lake Bangweulu region. Fish4Zambia’s goal is to better understand how gender equity and other socioeconomic factors within the fish value chain differentially impacts men and women in order to help transition rural children and families towards better food security, nutrition, and economic development through sustainable fisheries productivity.
Methods: To help achieve Fish4Zambia’s goal, we administered the Women’s Empowerment in Fisheries Index (WEFI) – which included the 6-item Household Hunger Scale (Ballard et al., 2011) – to a random sample of fish value chain actors in Zambia’s Lake Bangweulu region (N=397, 51% female). The Household Hunger Scale categorizes household-level hunger (HLH) in the past four weeks as occasional, moderate, or severe for three distinct Hunger Events (HE): HE1) no food to eat in household due to lack of resources, HE2) household member(s) went to sleep hungry, HE3) household member(s) went all day and night without food. We disaggregated the data by gender and conducted chi square analyses to examine the three HE.
Results: Women (67.1%, 137) were more likely than men (54.5%, 105) to report HE1 (p=.00). Women (64.7%, 135) were more likely than men (46.1%, 86) to report HE2 (p=.00). Women (49.1%, 100) were more likely than men (31.1%, 60) to report HE3 (p=.00). Although men and women were equally likely to report occasional HLH across all three HE, women were significantly more likely to report moderate and severe HLH for HE1 and HE2.
Discussion: Results suggest a need to unpack what makes women in this sample more food insecure than men. For example, is it because gender norms dictate that men are served first in participants’ households and women get less or nothing when there is a food shortage? This disaggregated data highlights the importance of taking gender into account in order to provide a more complete picture of how food insecurity impacts different groups across the fish value chain.
