Policy, Prices, Expenditures and Dietary Diversity of Rwandan Households

Over the past two decades, Rwanda has experienced impressive economic growth, resulting in considerable improvements in living standards and poverty reduction. Despite these gains, progress on nutritional status, especially those of rural children, continues to be a serious concern. This paper seeks to analyze dietary quality relative to income status and prices based on geographic location and other demographic variables. Findings begin to fill the analytic gap in our understanding of how agriculture and food policy can improve smallholder dietary diversity in ways that can in turn contribute to better health outcomes. Dietary diversity for the poor was largely influenced by household expenditures, meat prices, pulse production, fruit and vegetable production, ownership of animals, and land size. Policies/programs had an overall small and mixed effect on dietary diversity. Rwandans are price and expenditure sensitive on the demand side and thin markets exist on the supply side with distant markets that provide little diversity of foods in the rural markets. Multipronged policy and programs focused on increasing incomes, diversifying production, addressing relative prices, and nutrition education are required to increase dietary diversity and rural household health outcomes.