Resilience mobility in Uganda: A dynamic analysis

•Household resilience to food insecurity is measured through a latent variable model.•Changes of resilience over time is measured through transitional matrix.•Uganda panel data collected by the World Bank have been employed.•Education and participation to household’s enterprises are the main drivers of resilience.•Proper policies for enabling better market access should be set up. Household resilience to food insecurity can be considered as the capacity that ensures stressors and shocks do not have long-lasting adverse development consequences; it is, nowadays, one of the key words in the policy debate on development. Measuring resilience capacity and how it varies over time is extremely significant for policy makers and people living in risk-prone environments. More specifically, there is a gap of empirical evidence about what drives changes in resilience capacity status (i.e. moving from a low resilience profile to a high one, and viceversa). This paper applies econometric techniques for estimating household resilience and adopts transition matrices to estimate how it changes over time. Finally, multinomial logit and bivariate probit models are estimated to identify the main drivers of change. Our study finds that female headed households are less likely to become the most resilient; also this paper demonstrates that education and participation to household enterprises are positively associated with increased resilience capacity. This paper innovates the resilience literature by providing an evidence based analysis of the main drivers of resilience; it brings this evidence in the Uganda’s context, focusing the attention of the policy makers on sub-sample of population which are worse off. More generally, our study suggests that resilience enhancing policies can bridge humanitarian and development interventions by demonstrating how long-term perspectives (i.e. those investing in education) can lead to an immediate increase of resilience.