Credit Access is Associated with Improved Food Security in the Horn of Africa

arXiv:2609.24382 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-21 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-21

Updated: 2026-09-21

Project page: https://unhcr.github.io/dataviz-somalia-prmn/index.html

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: The intensification of climate change poses a growing threat to food security, especially in vulnerable communities.

Terminology

Abstract

The intensification of climate change poses a growing threat to food security, especially in vulnerable communities. This study employs an observational machine-learning framework to estimate the causal association between access to credit and acute food insecurity in Somalia and across the Horn of Africa, drawing on a harmonized dataset spanning key environmental, socioeconomic, and conflict-related factors from 2015 to 2022. Results indicate that greater credit access is associated with a 2% reduction in acute food insecurity at the population level over the study period. Given that, on average, 16% of the population is in crisis, this effect represents a meaningful shift within the at-risk group. We interpret these estimates under explicit identification assumptions and complement them with robustness and refutation tests. The results provide context-specific evidence on how financial access correlates with food security outcomes in data-scarce, crisis-affected settings, and offer a transparent framework for integrating heterogeneous data sources when randomized evaluations are infeasible.

Related papers