Gender Differences in the Impact of Domestic and International Remittances on Household Food Security. Evidence From Rural Zimbabwe

Despite efforts, food security remains an elusive goal in rural Africa. Without robust safety nets, households employ alternative coping strategies, including internal and international migration to leverage remittances. Using data from a 2024 nationally representative cross‐sectional survey of 17,942 rural households conducted by the Zimbabwe Livelihoods Assessment Committee, we investigate whether domestic and international remittances reduce food insecurity and whether these effects are gendered. We use Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to address self‐selection bias, augmented by Inverse Probability Weighting Regression Adjustment (IPWRA) method. We find that: First, women‐headed households are more likely to receive both domestic and international remittances compared to men‐headed households. Second, both domestic and international remittances reduce food insecurity. Third, domestic remittances are more likely than international remittances to reduce mild food insecurity, but less likely to reduce extreme food insecurity. Fourth, international remittances are more likely than domestic remittances to reduce extreme food insecurity than mild food insecurity. Lastly, international remittances reduce extreme food insecurity more if a household is headed by a woman than a man, while domestic remittances have a similar effect on mild food insecurity. Policy should enable affordable remittance transfers to rural areas and increase women's power in using remittance income.