Abstract:
After the devastatingly harsh winter of 2009/2010, locally known as dzud, many Mongolian herder households faced existential livelihood challenges. The most vulnerable members of the families, the children, suffered exceptionally from the resulting food shortage. The growing body of research on household resilience to food insecurity has rarely empirically examined the relationship between resilience and child malnutrition. This paper uses detailed panel survey data from 1768 households in western Mongolia from 2012 to 2014 to investigate whether resilience and, more precisely, which pillars of household resilience, protect children from malnutrition. Resilience was quantified via the resilience capacity index and investigated through structural equation modelling. Results confirm that children in households with a higher resilience capacity have a lower probability of being malnourished. Children born during dzud years are more likely to experience stunting, while the opposite occurs for children with more educated mothers.
