Impacts of Crop Diversification and Household Resilience on Welfare and Child Nutrition in Senegal

Climate variability increases production and income instability in rain-fed rural economies, with consequences for food security and child nutrition. In Senegal’s Groundnut Basin, where households rely on rain-fed farming and have limited formal risk-management options, crop diversification and household resilience are central strategies for protecting welfare. Although both are widely promoted as risk-management strategies, evidence remains limited on three fronts: the magnitude of welfare and nutritional gains from crop diversification under climate shocks; how the benefits of household resilience vary across households and by gender; and whether child nutrition outcomes improve with the level of crop diversification. This thesis investigates how crop diversification and household resilience influence household welfare, food and nutrition security, and child anthropometric outcomes. It contributes to the literature using cross-sectional data on 3,000 households from the National Food Security, Nutrition, and Resilience Survey. The first essay estimates the impacts of crop diversification on household welfare, including poverty-related outcomes and food and nutrition security, using a Marginal Treatment Effect framework that accounts for non-random adoption. The results indicate that crop diversification significantly improves household welfare, even under climatic shocks. The second essay quantifies household resilience to food insecurity using the Resilience Index Measurement Analysis (RIMA-II) approach and estimates the heterogeneous effects of resilience capacity on food and nutrition security by combining Two-Stage Least Squares with a Dose-Response Function. The findings show that higher resilience capacity is associated with better food and nutrition security outcomes. The dose-response analysis indicates that female-headed households benefit more from increases in resilience capacity, but also face larger declines in food and nutrition security when resilience is low. The third essay analyzes the impacts of the level of crop diversification on child nutritional outcomes using a multinomial endogenous switching regression model. The evidence suggests that nutritional gains are most consistently realized once households reach high levels of diversification.