Measuring rural households’ food consumption pattern using HDDS. A case of Mopani District Municipality, Limpopo province, South Africa

Abstract

Inadequate consumption of nutritious food is still a challenge in most rural areas, as majority of households are in between jobs. This leads to rural households not having stable jobs and this affects their income, and it results to rural household not been able to acquire nutritious food as level of income is one of the major factors that influence households’ dietary diversity and dietary quality. The purpose of this study was to measure household food consumption pattern using Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), with food groups over a recall period of seven days in rural household of Mopani District Municipality. The study estimated the determinants of rural household dietary diversity. The sample size of the study was 173 rural households, the sample size was determine using multi-stage sampling procedure and proportional random sampling as its sampling to select the rural households in Mopani district municipality. The descriptive statistics results indicated that majority of rural households have a high dietary diversity status and the average HDDS of food consumption was 80.75%. Regarding the regression results, household income, gender, level of education, access to a home garden and ownership of livestock suggested a positive influence of rural households in attaining high dietary diversity.