Dietary Diversity as a Food Security Indicator

This publication was produced by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance project (FANTA), with support from USAID. This work is part of a series of FANTA activities aimed at developing user-friendly, cost-effectiveapproaches to measuring changes in dietary quantity and quality and feeding behaviors at both the household and individual levels.

Dietary diversity, defined as the number of unique foods consumed over a given period of time, appears to show promise as a means of measuring food security and monitoring changes, particularly when resources forsuch measurement are scarce.

For the study, FANTA's subcontractor, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), analysed ten household data sets (collected in India, Mozambique, Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mali, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya and the Philippines) to assess whether dietary diversity can beused as a tool in evaluating the efficacy of food securityinterventions. The study validated the dietary diversity indicator as a measure of access to food (per capita expenditures) and a measure of consumption (caloric availability at the household level).