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Received Apr 13, 2017; Accepted Jan 11, 2018
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1. Background
Food insecurity is a state or a condition in which people experience limited or uncertain physical and economic access to safe, sufficient, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs or food preferences for a productive, healthy, and active life [1]. Food security, on the other hand, is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life [2]. Food insecurity is a major public health problem in both developing and developed nations. However, the proportion of undernourished people remains highest in sub-Saharan Africa [3, 4].
Ethiopia, one of the most food-insecure countries in Africa, has long history of famines and food shortages. More than half of the African’s food-insecure population lives in Ethiopia and six other countries [5]. The nutritional status of a mother is important, both as an indicator of her overall health and as a predictor of pregnancy outcome for both mother and child [6]. The proportion of women who are malnourished in selected sub-Saharan African countries for which a DHS was recently conducted ranges from 7 to 37%. Ethiopia has highest proportions of undernourished women [7]. The national prevalence of maternal BMI < 18.5 was 26% with 40% distribution in Afar region [8].
Household food insecurity has been associated with several health and nutrition outcomes [9]. Women’s nutrition affects a wide range of health and social issues, including family care and household food security [10]. Food insecurity and undernutrition in adolescent and pregnant women, compounded with gender discrimination, lead to an intergenerational cycle of nutritional problems [11]. One consequence is lowering of birth weight due to malnutrition in pregnancy, which perpetuates malnutrition between generations [7].
Ethiopian projection/forecasting for 2016 indicates that 0.4 and 1.7 million people will face severely and moderately acute undernutrition. Climatic shocks greatly affecting successive harvests and high food price inflation have combined to drive food insecurity and undernutrition significantly higher [12]. Pastoralists and agropastoralists...