The research team, led by Victoria Tanimonure, surveyed 656 households across all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones during the country’s second wave of infections, when Lagos, Kaduna, and the Federal Capital Territory served as epicentres. Data collection ran for twelve weeks, from mid-August to mid-October 2020, and was carried out almost entirely by telephone, a necessity imposed by lockdowns and movement restrictions. Respondents were recruited through a snowball sampling approach, in which initial contacts forwarded the survey link through their social networks, allowing the team to reach a geographically dispersed population despite pandemic constraints. The final sample exceeded the minimum of 384 respondents calculated using Cochran’s formula at a 95 percent confidence level and a 5 percent margin of error, giving the analysis additional statistical power.

To measure nutritional security, the researchers relied on the Household Dietary Diversity Score, a validated indicator that counts how many of twelve food groups a household consumed over a 24-hour recall period. The groups span cereals, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, fish, legumes, nuts and seeds, milk and dairy products, oils and fats, and sweets, spices, and beverages. Scores range from zero to twelve, with higher values signaling broader access to nutrient-rich foods and, by extension, better protection against micronutrient deficiencies. Households in the study achieved an average score of 7.90, meaning the typical respondent consumed roughly eight food groups per day even amid lockdown conditions, a level the authors characterize as relatively high dietary diversity.

The headline finding is stark: households that practiced home gardening scored considerably higher on dietary diversity than those that did not. When the researchers sorted households into low, medium, and high diversity categories, 67 percent of those in the high-diversity group, consuming six or more food groups, were home gardeners. By contrast, 77 percent of households in the low-diversity category, eating fewer than three food groups, had no garden at all. The pattern held across the middle tier as well, where 70 percent of households were non-gardeners. This distribution strongly suggests that garden produce, rich in vitamins A and C, iron, and protein, directly diversified diets at a moment when market access was unreliable and prices were climbing.

Quantifying this relationship rigorously required the researchers to confront a classic econometric problem. Households that choose to garden may differ systematically from those that do not, in age, education, resources, or motivation, so a naive comparison of gardeners and non-gardeners could produce biased estimates. To address this selection bias, the team employed a Heckpoisson regression, an extension of Heckman’s two-step correction adapted for count data. The model runs two equations simultaneously: a selection equation estimating which households choose to garden, and a Poisson outcome equation estimating dietary diversity among gardeners. Because the two equations shared predictors that could introduce collinearity problems, the researchers applied an exclusion restriction, omitting certain variables from the selection stage to obtain consistent estimates.

The regression results confirmed the descriptive patterns. Income earned from home gardening was positively and significantly associated with dietary diversity, with each additional unit of garden-derived income raising the dietary diversity score by 0.20 points. On average, gardening households earned an estimated 209,122.70 naira annually from their plots, whether in cash from selling surplus produce or in kind through household consumption. That supplementary income, the authors note, can be spent on food groups the garden does not supply, creating a virtuous cycle in which gardening both diversifies the diet directly and finances further diversification through purchases. It also cushions households against the food price inflation and market disruptions that defined the pandemic economy.

The study also mapped who gardens and why. Participation was predominantly female, with only 47 percent of respondents male, reflecting global patterns in which women manage subsistence production and household nutrition. Gardeners tended to be older and more educated, with respondents averaging 30.15 years of age and about 13.56 years of formal schooling. In the selection model, the age of the household head, the age of the respondent, and the number of children under one year old all significantly increased the likelihood of gardening. Households with infants, the authors suggest, are particularly motivated to secure fresh, nutritious foods that support breastfeeding mothers and child development, making the garden a targeted nutritional intervention rather than a general hobby.

Dietary diversity itself was shaped by a cluster of socio-demographic factors. Marital status was positively associated with food security, consistent with evidence that married caregivers are better positioned nutritionally. Household size, counterintuitively, improved dietary diversity, likely because larger families pool income, share labor for garden maintenance, and make collective food decisions, though the authors acknowledge this runs against much of the literature linking bigger households to insecurity. The presence of an infant under one year old raised diversity scores, apparently because mothers deliberately broaden their own diets to improve breast milk quality. Meanwhile, the age of the household head and the presence of members aged 18 to 60 and above 60 were negatively associated with dietary diversity, with older respondents facing elevated risks of food and nutrition insecurity.

The pandemic’s fingerprint was equally visible. Households that reported being negatively affected by COVID-19 had significantly lower dietary diversity scores than those that were not, and 85 percent of households in the low-diversity category had been hit by the pandemic, compared with only 14 percent of the unaffected. Among high-diversity households, 62 percent had escaped the worst effects. Older respondents, older household heads, and larger households were disproportionately represented among the unaffected, suggesting that accumulated experience, savings, diversified income sources, and stronger support networks conferred resilience. The regression analysis confirmed that COVID-19 exposure carried a negative and statistically significant coefficient, underscoring how lockdowns, income losses, and restricted market access translated directly into poorer diets.

The authors conclude that home gardening deserves a central place in Nigeria’s food security and livelihood programming, particularly as the country confronts ongoing stress in which roughly 32.1 million people face food crisis or worse. They recommend awareness campaigns by governments and NGOs, subsidies or public-private partnerships for quality seeds and inputs, expanded extension services teaching organic farming and integrated pest management, and urban agriculture policies that ease land access and promote community gardens. Significant barriers remain, including scarce urban land, fragmented rural plots, limited inputs, and erratic rainfall driven by climate change. But the evidence from the pandemic years suggests that a modest investment in backyard plots can pay a double dividend, feeding households better while putting additional income in their pockets, a lesson that will matter long after the crisis has passed.

Subject of Research: The impact of home gardening on household nutritional security and income during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria

Article Title: Home gardening for advancing nutritional security and income generation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria

Article References: Home gardening for advancing nutritional security and income generation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-025-00010-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44399-025-00010-0

Keywords: home gardening, nutritional security, dietary diversity, COVID-19, Nigeria, food security, household income, Heckpoisson regression, urban agriculture, micronutrients, livelihoods, BMC Agriculture

The research team, led by Bernadett Varga and Gábor Pál Stromájer of the University of Pécs, together with Renáta Büki-Vilics and Tímea Stromájer-Rácz, set out to explore how socioeconomic variation within a socially vulnerable population relates to health-related quality of life, parental health behaviors, dietary and feeding-related conditions, and the use of preventive healthcare services. Data collection began in April 2026 and focused on families with children aged zero to three years. Because these families are socially vulnerable and often difficult to reach through conventional survey channels, the researchers used targeted field-based data collection and convenience sampling, ultimately enrolling 88 participants.

Methodologically, the study combined a self-developed questionnaire covering sociodemographic characteristics, health behaviors, dietary conditions and preventive healthcare utilization with the SF-36, a widely validated instrument for measuring health-related quality of life across eight domains, including mental and physical health. The statistical toolkit was deliberately broad: chi-square tests and independent-samples t-tests for bivariate comparisons, analysis of variance for group differences, multiple linear regression to identify independent predictors of quality of life, and Firth’s penalized logistic regression for outcomes with sparse data. That last technique matters. When an outcome is rare or a category is thinly populated, conventional logistic regression can produce unstable, wildly inflated odds ratios; Firth’s method applies a penalized likelihood that corrects for small-sample bias, making it well suited to exploratory work in small, vulnerable cohorts like this one.

The headline result concerns food. Children of mothers with lower educational attainment consumed sugary snacks significantly more frequently, a difference that held up statistically with a p-value of 0.005. More striking still, the penalized regression revealed that families describing their financial situation as average had dramatically lower odds of being unable to provide five daily meals compared with families reporting poor financial status, with an odds ratio of 0.052 and a 95 percent confidence interval running from 0.0004 to 0.469. In plain terms, even a modest step up from poverty-level finances was associated with a roughly twentyfold reduction in the odds of meal insecurity. The direction of the association was reinforced from the dietary side as well: rare fruit and vegetable consumption was linked to significantly higher odds of being unable to provide five daily meals compared with daily consumption, with an odds ratio of 11.506 and a confidence interval of 1.832 to 131.516.

These numbers tell a coherent story about nutritional security in early childhood. Five daily meals is a benchmark of structured, adequate feeding for toddlers and preschoolers, and the inability to reach it signals a household under genuine strain. The finding that fruit and vegetable scarcity clusters with meal insecurity suggests that the problem is not merely one of meal frequency but of dietary quality, the dimension of nutrition most tightly linked to micronutrient adequacy, immune development and long-term metabolic health. The sugary snack pattern among children of less-educated mothers fits the broader international literature, in which lower educational attainment is consistently associated with energy-dense, nutrient-poor feeding practices, often because cheaper calories are more accessible under budget pressure.

Caregiver mental health emerged as the study’s second major theme. In bivariate analyses, respondents’ mental health scores on the SF-36 were lower among participants with poorer financial status and lower maternal educational attainment. Yet when the researchers moved to the multivariable model, these socioeconomic factors were no longer independently associated with mental health. That statistical pattern is common in small exploratory studies and carries an important interpretive lesson: the apparent link between poverty and psychological distress in this cohort may operate through other variables, such as feeding stress, housing conditions or social support, rather than as a direct independent effect. The authors are careful on this point, framing the mental health findings as associated mainly with household socioeconomic indicators at the bivariate level rather than as proven causal drivers.

The preventive healthcare picture was strikingly uneven. Participation in health visitor screenings was remarkably high at 96.6 percent, reflecting the strength of Hungary’s universal health visiting system, in which trained nurses make regular contact with families with young children, often in the home. Attendance at pediatric dental screenings, by contrast, was low at just 34.1 percent. That gap is more than a curiosity. Early childhood caries remains one of the most common chronic conditions of early childhood worldwide, and disadvantaged communities typically bear a disproportionate burden. A system that successfully brings nearly every family into health visitor contact but reaches only one in three children for dental screening represents a clear, actionable target for intervention, particularly since existing health visitor infrastructure could plausibly serve as a bridge to oral health services.

The authors emphasize that the preventive healthcare utilization indicators showed a heterogeneous and primarily descriptive pattern, and they are explicit that the study is exploratory. With 88 participants recruited through convenience sampling in a single national program, the findings cannot be generalized to all families in disadvantaged settlements, and the cross-sectional design precludes any claim about causality. It is equally plausible that financial hardship worsens feeding outcomes as that feeding difficulties strain household finances. Confidence intervals as wide as the one attached to the fruit and vegetable finding, spanning from under 2 to over 130, are a reminder of the statistical uncertainty inherent in small-sample penalized models. What the study loses in precision, however, it gains in access: data from populations this hard to reach are rare, and even exploratory estimates fill a genuine evidence vacuum.

The research was conducted under the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with approval from the Regional Research Ethics Committee of the University of Pécs granted in March 2026, and the authors declare no competing interests and no external funding. The team acknowledges the participating families and the professionals of the Felzárkózó Települések, or Closing Gap Settlements, Program, whose cooperation made the fieldwork possible. That program, which targets Hungary’s most deprived communities with integrated services for children and families, provided the practical entry point that academic surveys often lack in settlements where distrust of institutions and logistical barriers routinely depress participation.

The practical implications reach beyond Hungary. Across Europe and beyond, policymakers designing early childhood interventions for marginalized communities frequently treat the target population as homogeneous, applying uniform programs to communities that are internally diverse in income, education and need. This study’s central message is that within-population socioeconomic variation matters, even inside already-disadvantaged settlements. Families reporting average finances differed measurably from families in poverty on meal provision, and maternal education left a detectable fingerprint on children’s snacking patterns. Future preventive and supportive programs, the authors conclude, should account for that internal variation, attend to caregiver well-being as a component of child health, and treat family-level nutritional security as a priority. In the earliest years of life, when the foundations of physical and cognitive development are laid, the difference between five meals a day and fewer may echo for decades.

Subject of Research: Socioeconomic determinants of caregiver well-being and early childhood health indicators in disadvantaged Hungarian settlements

Article Title: Household socioeconomic variation, caregiver well-being, and selected early health-related indicators among families with children aged 0–3 years living in disadvantaged settlements in Hungary

Article References: Varga, B., Büki-Vilics, R., Stromájer-Rácz, T., & Stromájer, G. P. (2026). Household socioeconomic variation, caregiver well-being, and selected early health-related indicators among families with children aged 0–3 years living in disadvantaged settlements in Hungary. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29618-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29618-w

Keywords: early childhood, socioeconomic inequality, caregiver well-being, nutritional security, preventive healthcare, disadvantaged settlements, Hungary, maternal education, SF-36, health visitors, dental screening, public health