Coping or Hoping? Livelihood Diversification and Food Insecurity in the COVID-19 Pandemic

We examine the impact of livelihood diversification on food insecurity amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis uses household panel data from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria in which the first round was collected immediately prior to the pandemic and extends through multiple rounds of monthly data collection during the pandemic. Using this pre- and post-outbreak data, and guided by a pre-analysis plan, we estimate the causal effect of livelihood diversification on food insecurity. Our results do not support the hypothesis that livelihood diversification boosts household resilience. Though income diversification may serve as an effective coping mechanism for small-scale shocks, we find that for a disaster on the scale of the pandemic this strategy is not effective. Policymakers looking to prepare for the increased occurrence of large-scale disasters will need to grapple with the fact that coping strategies that gave people hope in the past may fail them as they try to cope with the future.