Locking down adolescent hunger: COVID‐19 and food security in Bangladesh

Abstract

Policy responses to slow the spread of COVID‐19 have increased economic insecurity globally. We use panel data collected immediately before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic with adolescents in Bangladesh to assess the association between COVID‐19‐related restrictions and adolescent hunger. One year into the pandemic, adolescents were three‐fold more likely to report hunger, and households were twice as likely to report cutting back food to adolescents compared to before COVID‐19 restrictions. Vulnerable households experienced larger increases in hunger and reductions in food consumption, with girls more adversely affected than boys. Cash and food aid were unable to mitigate these negative trends.

Lessons from a time of upheaval: COVID‐19 in South Asia

“…These range from telephone surveys of carefully crafted representative samples to large-scale dipstick surveys, to the recording of narratives using community-led radio programming or personal diaries. 3 Several papers in this volume rely on phone surveys of households and enterprises (Ahmed et al, 2023;Boughton et al, 2023;Kabir et al, 2023;Kharel et al, 2023;Seager et al, 2023), including some that re-interview respondents from previous rounds. Collectively, the diversity of metrics they use to measure hunger, poverty, income, and resilience illustrates both the potential and the pitfalls of phone surveys.…”

“…Their work offers a cautionary note that crises may deepen existing inequalities, though these caste gaps all but disappear after 20 months. Seager et al (2023) focus on adolescents, another potentially vulnerable group. Using data collected immediately before and during the COVID-19, they show that a year into the pandemic, adolescents were three times more likely to report hunger, and households were twice as likely to report cutting back food to adolescents compared to before COVID-19 restrictions.…”

“…Other papers highlight the role of social protection, including cash transfers in Bangladesh (Ahmed et al, 2023), a rural workfare guarantee in India (Varshney & Meenakshi, 2023), and a livestock transfer program in Nepal (Ekstrom et al, 2023). Two papers provide an assessment on the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable groups: Seager et al (2023) examine adolescent hunger in Bangladesh, and Ramachandran and Deshpande (2023) discuss the heterogenous impacts of the pandemic on employment outcomes in India. Finally, Boughton et al (2023), Davies et al (2023), Ecker et al (2023) and Dorosh et al (2023) use modeling approaches to provide sectoral or economy‐wide insights into the medium‐ and longer‐term economic impacts of the pandemic, including when coupled with other shocks as was the case in Myanmar.…”

Understanding associations between the COVID-19 pandemic and menstrual hygiene management among adolescent girls in Ethiopia: findings from a mixed-methods longitudinal study

“…We measured household vulnerability using an index of nine indicators that capture a household's overall vulnerability to COVID-19 across five domains, following Seager et al 22 : socioeconomic, housing and hygiene, healthcare access, demographic, and epidemiologic. The measures included in the index across the socioeconomic, housing and hygiene, and healthcare access domains were captured during baseline.…”