Impact of Farm and Non-Farm Micro-Enterprise Diversifications on Household Dietary Diversity in Malawi

Micro-enterprising is crucial for improving rural households’ food and nutrition status in subsistence agrarian economy like Malawi. There are no studies that have concurrently analyzed the roles of farm and non-farm micro-enterprise diversity on household dietary diversity (proxy measure of household food access) in Malawi. With the following objectives, the study jointly (1) analyzed the effects of farm and non-farm micro-enterprises diversifications on rural household food access, and (2) analyzed relevant socio-economic and institutional factors on household dietary diversity in selected districts of Malawi. Data were collected from 1827 households; whereby 779 households were engaged in some kind of farm and non-farm micro-enterprises in six districts with high concentration of micro-businesses and population densities. Both parametric and parametric descriptive statistics, Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions were used for estimations. Of all the factors associated with household dietary diversity, farm and non-farm enterprise diversity, as well as expenditure on food items had played major roles in influencing household dietary diversity. Increasing farm and non-farm micro-enterprise diversity by one micro-business group is associated with the possibility of consuming or having access to all 12 groups of food by the households. Holding other things constant, it is surprisingly found that nutrition education (34.2%, ρ=0.000<0.001) influenced household food dietary diversity more than household heads with formal education (average 5 years of schooling); suggesting that nutrition education, if directly delivered to the household heads regardless of their formal education level, is one of the major factors that can positively and significantly affect household dietary diversity in Malawi. These results also resonate to the Government of Malawi’s overarching policy goal of furthering income-generating social and economic activities in order to become less reliant on hand-outs and donors at large. Besides increasing only starchy staple food or monotonous cereal-based diet through various agricultural subsidy programmes, such micro-enterprising programs are also needed to enhance by targeting energy and nutritious food supply that are essential if the country is aiming to expand its industry and service sector with healthy population.