Household Economy Analysis in Southern Niger Report on a household economy survey of Two livelihood Zones of Tessaoua District, Maradi Region September 2007 Julius Holt & Sonya LeJeune, consultants [This report is designed to accompany the Livelihood Zone Profiles which have been produced separately. The intention is to provide information on the methodology and to offer expanded comments on the interpretation and implications of the survey results.] Financé par ECHO : HEA Tessaoua District, Niger – September 2007 1 INTRODUCTION Poverty and Malnutrition Household Economy Analysis (HEA) helps us to understand the structure and dynamics of rural poverty. This should be relevant when SCUK looks for the causes of malnutrition, and especially undernutrition, with the reasonable assumption that poverty is highly implicated. But 'poverty' is a concept that comes with much baggage, including increasingly ill-defined references to 'vulnerability'. Perhaps clarity will be gained if instead we turn the matter around and consider briefly why child malnutrition (in the sense of undernourishment rather than obesity) is so comparatively rare in a rich, urbanised country like the UK. This is indeed an easy one: there is no reason for anyone to be undernourished in the UK, except in some serious illnesses and a very small percentage of social cases. Foods containing basic calories and all essential nutrients are available for an astonishingly low proportion of even the most modest budget, and fresh milk is amongst the cheapest foods of all. The physical environment for the vast majority of children is sanitary and safe, health services are highly advanced and universally available, and as a substitute for the direct care and charity (and associated social coercion) within the extended family or local community found in the old rural society, there is a formal system of inspection, control and provision when physical and social conditions are deemed to threaten the wellbeing of children or the aged1. Sufficient nutrition depends very little on the educational level of parents, and if children of more educated parents are statistically more likely to have a healthier diet than those of less educated parents, the difference is very rarely seen in undernutrition amongst the latter children. If we now look at rural Niger, we need only reverse the picture of modern UK to see where undernutrition, as well as much other malnutrition, comes from. Whilst some farmers produce substantial surpluses in most years, the majority are always in greater or lesser deficit of the cereals and pulses which form as much as 90% of their diet. They must make up the difference mainly from the market. Purchase of food, including a few vegetables and condiments, takes up a very high proportion of poorer people's expenditure even where they are paid directly in grain for some of their labour; and there is a marked seasonal variation in access2. Substantial milk consumption would be a luxury for the great majority of the agricultural population who must buy it. Even if a poor household is fortunate enough to maintain a cow, they will get very little milk from it for much of the year, since pastures soon fade in the dry season and there is no money to buy fodder. Weaning is a particular shock to infants where there is no animal milk. The physical environment for young children is highly unsafe and unsanitary by UK standards. Health services are rudimentary where they are effectively available at all, and poor vaccination coverage makes the environment all the more unsafe for children3. Community care and charity are essential to the survival not only of 'social cases' (e.g. the few aged people living alone, or households with no able-bodied member) but also to that of the poorest economically active group whom we have called the 'Very Poor'. The redistribution by one means or another of food, cash and even livestock from wealthier to poorer households is a major, enumerated feature of the survey results. But in addition, the openness of rural living, where everybody knows a great deal about everybody else's business, also promotes the mutual support between relatives and neighbours that disappears in modern urban settings where most people are economically independent of their wider family: modern living tends to isolate households physically and to 1 Although it must be said that care of the aged leaves a great deal to be desired. 2 Critics who complain of a 'food first' mentality or an obsession with food security amongst some aid agents might like to consider how very much of poor rural peoples' livelihood effort is concentrated just on getting enough to eat through the year. 3 The field teams noted in the villages several infants/young children who were blind and/or deaf reportedly through measles. Page 2 of 37 HEA Niger 2007 Report Final Final HEA Tessaoua District, Niger – September 2007 some extent socially. The only feature in which a plain contrast between the UK and rural Niger is not quite so obvious is the link between the educational level of parents and malnutrition in their children. In the UK there is a definite association between childhood obesity and low educational and social status, and the phenomenon is of increasing concern in the public health domain. In Niger, regarding undernutrition rather than obesity, it is true that at the national level a link has been made between the level of education of mother and malnutrition1, most markedly when the mother has reached secondary education. But turning to the villages of Tessaoua where the literacy rate is very low, and extremely few mothers have reached secondary education2, the results of the recent SCUK village survey (Ref.1) in Tessaoua Département do not encourage us to believe that the educational level of parents has a strong, positive association with the nutritional status of their children. Indeed it is not immediately clear what advantage basic literacy amongst parents might confer to child nutrition in this setting, unless it is lessons to schoolchildren on hygiene or good nutrition which they then apply much later, in parenthood - a far from proven fact. On the other hand the nutritional status of children in this survey is positively associated with the wealth of the household. But even if slightly more people from the wealthier groups have gone to primary school than from the poorer groups, it seems highly likely that the determinant of differences in nutritional status is the quantity and quality of diet, and this does not correlate with basic literacy amongst the parents. Within the overall sphere of poverty, different analysts choose their particular area to concentrate upon. There is a main division between health and nutrition analysis on the one hand, and economic analysis on the other. Both are evidently relevant to an understanding of malnutrition, but they are rarely directly linked by practitioners: for instance, it is rare to have anthropometric data and wealth breakdown information on the same set of children, as in the above-mentioned survey. What HEA describes HEA lies squarely on the economic analysis side, and aims to offers a clear picture of the scope, constraints and internal differentials of rural poverty. It is a form of livelihoods analysis which takes access to sufficient food as a basic reference point. As such it has commonly been used in relation to food security matters. But HEA actually offers a more complete analysis of household economy, because the analytical framework stands on three pillars: - where and how households obtain their food; - the sources and amounts of household cash income; - the proportions of household expenditure on different items. This wider information is therefore relevant to issues beyond food security; indeed, the necessity of cash earnings nowadays for most villagers in most places simply to get access to sufficient food means that there can be little difference between food security analysis and overall livelihoods security analysis. 1 Stunting prevalence amongst young children: 14.1% when the mother has reached at least secondary education; 40.9 % when the mothers have attended primary education and 45.8% when mothers have no education at all (source: EDSN – MICS 2006) 2 There are also few secondary-level educated men in the villages, since the point of secondary education (at least in parents' eyes) is to get young adults off the land, out of the village and into business or employment in the town. Poorer rural parents today make financial sacrifices to get their children educated but are largely unable to support their children in secondary school unless the school is within walking distance of the home. Page 3 of 37 HEA Niger 2007 Report Final Final HEA Tessaoua District, Niger – September 2007 HEA provides a good, general resource for SCUK's advocacy role for poor children, in that it describes the household economy which is the basis of children's survival and the major determinant of their futures. But much of the interest of the story offered by an HEA survey lies in the detail of the many different things poorer people must do to survive. The nearer people are to the threshold between just making ends meet or failing to do so, the more complicated the picture gets. And it is these marginal but crucial activities which must be of particular interest to those in SCUK devising interventions, because no NGO is in a position to change the fundamental structure of poverty. The current survey was not only of the relatively poor households. Much effort has gone into understanding the economy of the wealthier households of villages too, those identified as of 'middle' and ‘better off’ economic status, together comprising a little under half of the population (and some 35% of households, since these usually have more members than poorer households).