Classifying acute food insecurity using the Household Hunger Scale (FAO, ACF/AAH and IMPACT/ REACH Initiative)

These projects were to help improve the understanding and analysis of households living in famine or famine-like conditions to enable improved prevention, mitigation and response. One of the challenges facing food security analysts across the region is accurately distinguishing household characteristics between different phases of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) tool.

CHC’s role was to: Improve field methods of identifying households in Phase 5, and appropriate indicators to identify them, give practical recommendations for inclusion of other minimal data, offer practical recommendations for improving early warning, and better differentiating between early warning information and current-status assessment information, give practical recommendations for use of community-level and qualitative information and come up with a research proposal for incorporating these recommendations into on-the-ground assessment and early warning activities, and ground-trothing their application and impact on improving humanitarian analysis.

The study involved interviewing affected households to assess their general classification, included the Household Hunger Scale for the score to be matched to the classification