Food Security And Dietary Diversity Among Households In Ohaukwu Local Government Area, Ebonyi State:- Ogamde, Precious A

ABSTRACT Food insecurity and poor dietary diversity remain significant challenge among households in Nigeria, affecting their overall health and wellbeing. The objective of the study is to assess the food security and dietary diversity among households in Ohaukwu Local Government Area, Ebonyi State. The study employed cross-sectional descriptive Study. The study employed crosssectional descriptive study. A multistage sampling was used to select the households. In the first stage, purposive sampling was used to select Ebonyi state out ofthe five states in the southeast. In the second stage, simple random sampling was used to select Ohaukwu out of the 13 local government in Ebonyi state. In the third stage, cluster Sampling was used to sample households in Ohaukwu because of geographically dispersed population. There was a random selection of 273 households from the three clans. Food security was measured using Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). Household dietary diversity was measured using 24 hours recall. Descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage) were used to summarize demographic information, farm characteristics, food security levels and dietary diversity. Inferential statistics were used to determine the relationship between food security and dietary diversity among the households. All analyses were performed using IBM Statistical Package for service solution (SPSS) windows version 25. The sociodemographic characteristics showed that some (31.1%) were within 36 to 45 years. A good proportion (68.5%) of the respondents were females. Almost half (44.7%) earned less than N70,000. The result on farm characteristics indicated that nearly half (49.1%) acquired their land through hiring. Most household (80.2%) practiced mixed cropping and have gardens at home (87.9%) for cultivating green leafy vegetables (59.0%). The result on food insecurity status showed that 37.0% ofthe households were severely food insecure, 33.7% moderate food insecure. 17.6% mild food insecure and 11.7% were food secure. The result on dietary diversity showed that 75.1% of households had medium dietary diversity, 23.4% had high dietary diversity, 1.5% had low dietary diversity. There was a strong negative relationship between food security and dietary diversity with a Pearson (r) of-0.384, significant at 1% level (p<0.01). These findings underscore the existence of food insecurity and lack of diverse diet among the population. Promoting household food production, nutrition education, market and infrastructure access, policy support and .monitoring can help in reducing food insecurity and poor dietary diversity