Food Aid and its contextual influence among residents of Turkana County, Kenya

Abstract

Food aid has become a major mechanism for stabilizing domestic supplies in food-insecure countries and targeting food supply to alleviate hunger and food insecurity. Few studies document how food aid has been contextualized by the residents. This study is therefore aimed to understand food aid and its contextual influence among residents of Turkana County. This study adopted a case design which was guided by social construction theory. The potential study participants were identified from households that were beneficiaries of food aid and sampled using snowballing technique to saturation at 45 households. Participants’ data was collected using in-depth and key-informant interviews as well as focus group discussions. The recorded information was then transcribed and analyzed thematically. This study reports that food aid is understood differently in various contexts from the household, village and national level. It can be concluded that food insecurity and resultant food aid is a major source of household conflict. There is need for enhanced community participation by humanitarian organizations, strengthened auditing initiatives on humanitarian organizations, diversification of income sources among residents of As a policy implication, the findings of this study demonstrate that there is need for legal, legislative and societal reforms on communal understanding of food aid and adoption of existing coping strategies. The theoretical implication of these study findings is that social construction theories are useful in the understanding of food insecurity as a social problem. Socially constructed meanings influence human behavior creating the need to deconstruct the meanings that societies bestow on food aid as an initial stage in mitigating food insecurity