Food Insecurity in Conflict Affected Regions in Nigeria 2017

The food security survey was a telephone based survey conducted between August 15th and September 8th 2017. The interview was the second round of a telephone survey using a sub-set of the sample of GHS (General Household Survey) households. The first round of the telephone interview was administered during spring 2017 with 717 completed interviews with the following geographical distribution: 175 interviews in the North East, 276 in North Central and 266 in South South. The first round was focused on conflict exposure, while the second round discussed in this report focused on food insecurity in conflict affected regions.

In the three conflict affected geographical zones comprising of 16 states of Nigeria, households from LGS's that had high conflict exposure were oversampled chosen for a pilot sample, conducted before the telephone surveys. These LGS's were chosen based on the following criteria: The oversampled LGS's needed to have over 10 conflict events during 2012-14 recorded in the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) database.

The first round of the telephone survey (which took place after the pilot) first attempted to reach 742 households from the GHS panel, of which 529 could be reached and interviewed. The rest did not have phone numbers or functioning phone numbers (only 2.7 percent refused to answer). In order to increase the sample size to a level that was considered adequate for the survey, an additional 288 replacement households were included in the sample also from the GHS panel. Out of these replacement households 188 could be interviewed. Therefore altogether 1030 households were attempted to be reached, with a final sample size of 717 completed interviews.

Conflict affected areas were oversampled in order to have a large enough sample of households that in fact experienced conflict events in order to shed light on the type of events that have happened. A random sample of the zones might have given too small sample of conflict affected households and therefore restricted the analysis of the various types of conflict events. Due to the oversampling however, the sample drawn was not representative at the level of the geographical zone, as is the case in the GHS. Therefore in the analysis we use sampling weights that adjust for the propensity of being in a conflict affected LGA in order to ensure that the sample is representative at the level of the geographical zone.

During the second round of the survey 582 of the 717 households were re-interviewed on food security related issues (only the 717 were attempted to be reached). Of the 582 households, 147 in the North East, 219 in North Central, and 216 in South South were interviewed. The attrition rates in our sample from round one to round two are hence 16 percent, 21 percent, and 19 percent for North East, North Central and South South, respectively. The attrition from the conflict survey round was mostly due to not being able to reach the respondents possibly due to non-functioning phone numbers. Only 3 percent of respondents refused to answer.

Similar telephone-based surveys are being conducted in six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa under the World Bank project "Listening to Africa". As a comparison, a mobile phone survey in Tanzania (see Croke et al. 2012 for details), had a high drop-out rate between the very first rounds from 550 to 458 respondents, but very low attrition for the subsequent rounds for the 458 respondents, who could reliably be reached by a mobile phone. In light of this reference point and also considering the fact that the households interviewed live in conflict affected regions, our attrition rates seem to be within reasonable limits.