Microcredit Program Participation and Household Food Security in Rural Bangladesh

We use a relatively new and unique panel dataset collected from rural households in Bangladesh to examine the effect of microcredit program participation on household food security. The main distinguishing feature of our analysis is that no other study, to the best of our knowledge, has made an attempt so far to systematically measure the impact of participation status on different measures of food insecurity — household calorie consumption, dietary diversity indicators and nutritional status of mother and children. The detailed nature of the dataset also allows us to analyze the impact of the duration of participation in such programs on the food security situation of the household. The overall results of the paper suggest that program participation reduces both the incidence and intensity of food insecurity in rural Bangladesh – it increases household and per capita calorie consumption, reduces the incidence of food poverty and the prevalence of malnutrition, but has no significant effect on the dietary diversity indicators of the household.