ABSTRACT

This study assessed the food security and anthropometric status of adolescent school girls in Enugu North Local Government Area, Enugu State. The study was a cross-sectional study. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select a total of 300 adolescent school girls. Data on personal information of the adolescent school girls and socio-economic status of their parents and food security were collected using structured and validated questionnaire. Anthropometric status were gathered using standard procedures. The IBM SPSS version 22.0 computer programme was used to analyse the data. WHO Anthro plus was used to grade the anthropometric status of adolescent school girls. Data obtained were described using frequency and percentage. Chi-square was used to determine the association between socio-economic characteristics of the parents, food security status and anthropometric status of the adolescent school girls. Significant association was judged at p ≤ 0.05. The result from the study showed that there was a high prevalence (68.6%) of food insecurity among the adolescent school girls. Most of the adolescent school girls in this study were found to be food insecure.  The anthropometric status of the adolescent school girls showed that some (4.3) of the adolescent school girls were stunted. The Prevalence of thinness (6.0%), overweight (14.3%) and obesity (4.3) were also observed in this study. There was a significant association (p < 0.05) between occupation of the mothers, occupation of fathers, educational qualification of mothers and food security level of the adolescent school girls. For food security to be achieved, all four components such as food availability, accessibility, utilization and stability must be present. Therefore, both governmental and non-governmental organizations working in nutrition sensitive and nutrition specific program should perform their tasks in averting unacceptably high prevalence of household and adolescent food insecurity.