COVID-19 and Food Security in Ethiopia: Do Social Protection Programs Protect?

We assess the ability of Ethiopia’s flagship social protection program, the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), to mitigate the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and nutrition security of households, mothers, and children. We use both prepandemic in-person household survey data and a postpandemic phone survey. Employing a household fixed effects difference-in-differences approach, we find that household food insecurity increased by 11.7 percentage points and the size of the food gap increased by 0.47 months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic. Participation in the PSNP offsets virtually almost all of this adverse change; the likelihood of becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage points for PSNP households, and the food gap increased by only 0.13 months. The protective role of the PSNP was greater for poorer households and those living in remote areas. Results are robust to definitions of PSNP participation, different estimators, and how we account for the nonrandomness of mobile phone ownership. Furthermore, PSNP households were less likely to reduce expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage points and were less likely to reduce expenditures on agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points.