Do grassroots institutions promote household food security? Evidence from cooperative membership in the Southern Highland Regions of Tanzania

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Society (AMCOS) membership on household food security. The Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) models were used to evaluate whether changes in the treated group attributed to their membership. The study used cross-section data collected in 2016 from 1400 households in the southern highland regions of Mbeya and Songwe in Tanzania. The outcome variable of interest was the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS). The logit estimates indicated that age of the household head, total land owned, land cultivated, and whether a household head accessed credit from microfinance institutions significantly predicted the likelihood of joining a cooperative membership. Results of PSM show that ATT was negative (-0.039) implying that being treated cooperative members were likely to improve household food security. On the contrary, the result from ESR suggested that being treated cooperative membership a had negative impact on reducing household food insecurity status. The differences in ATT from PSM and that from ESR models suggest that both observed and unobserved factors influence the decision to join cooperative membership and household food security outcome given the joining decisions. However, the Transitional Heterogeneity effect was negative (TH= -0.486) implying that the impact on reducing food insecurity was much higher to rural farm household that did receive intervention compared to untreated cooperative members. The study recommends the need to promote policies that aim to strengthen cooperatives and their functioning for the rural farming households to boost their income and improve household food security.