Rural Household Food Insecurity and Child Malnutrition in Northern Ghana

Abstract

Close to 750 million or nearly one in ten people in the world are exposed to severe levels of food insecurity, and 2 billion people do not have regular access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food. A critical but overlooked question is how to properly locate the most food insecure and malnourished households within geographical areas that have been generally identified as food insecure and malnourished – especially where such areas are poorly mapped. The YouthMappers approach served as a baseline to inform our spatial analysis of food insecurity and underpinned household surveys on malnutrition. The resulting maps paint a powerful picture of the spatial variation of factors affecting different places, knowledge which can better inform interventions that are tailored to households in need and ultimately help to meet the goals of SDG 2, Zero Hunger.