CEEG Seminar Series: The impact of COVID-19 on the nutrition of Mozambican families and children

On Wednesday 20 April  2022, Margherita Squarcina, PhD student at the University of Florence, will present her ongoing study entitled 'The impact of COVID-19 on the nutrition of Mozambican families and children'.

The seminar is part of the CEEG Seminar Series, organized under the Inclusive growth in Mozambique (IGM) programme. The seminars offer a forum to share and discuss ongoing research on topics related to the work of the IGM programme and to foster a culture of research at the faculty and at UEM in general.

The seminars take place at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) and are open for all. The presentations are given in Portuguese.

About the study

The study aims at investigating the impact of COVID-19 and related restrictions on household food consumption and children's nutritional outcomes in Mozambique. Specifically, this study aims at understanding how the socio-economic effects of the crisis have in turn affected nutritional outcomes. Due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, households are expected to adjust their food choices both in terms of food quality towards cheaper and unhealthier food and in terms of quantity, reducing diet diversification and increasing the exposure to malnutrition, mainly of children. Empirical evidence on the effects of COVID-19 on child nutrition however is still scarce due to lack of data. Relying on household survey data from 2019/2020, which includes anthropometric measures for under-5 children, this paper aims to fill this evidence gap. The authors employ a difference-in-difference with propensity score weighting as our main specification. Additionally, pseudo-panel at geographical and age-cohort levels has been computed to control for time-invariant unobserved characteristics. Preliminary results show that there has been a significant reduction in household food consumption, both in terms of quantity consumed and in terms of dietary diversity.