Food Security and Nutrition

The 2013 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report—the eighth in an annual series—presents a multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger. It shows that the world has made some progress in reducing hunger since 1990, but still has far to go. World hunger remains “serious,” and 19 countries suffer from levels of hunger that are either “alarming” or “extremely alarming.”

Although food security measurement has been substantially expanded in recent decades, there persists significant dissatisfaction with existing measurement systems, especially in the wake of the global food and financial crisis. In this paper we first set out a list of criteria that an ideal food security measurement system should satisfy. We then benchmark existing indicators and measurement systems against those criteria as a means of systematically identifying their relative strengths and weaknesses.

There is a general consensus that food for education (FFE) programs increase primary school participation. Although this view is widely held, there is limited causal evidence to support it. Moreover, little is known about how the design of FFE programs affects schooling outcomes. This article presents evidence of the impacts of alternative methods of FFE delivery on schooling in Northern Uganda using a randomized controlled evaluation conducted from 2005 to 2007.

Ethiopia's Food Security Programme provides income transfers through public works in its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as well as targeted services provided through the Other Food Security Programme (OFSP) and, later, the Household Asset Building Programme (HABP) designed to improve agricultural productivity. There is a trade-off in these two types of transfers between short-term improvements in food security and longer term food security achieved through increased agricultural productivity.

This report documents progress in the implementation of the Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP) and the Household Assets Building Programme (HABP) and assesses trends in perceptions of the effectiveness and transparency of the PSNP and HABP among different groups of clients. It also describes how living standards are evolving in PSNP and non-PSNP beneficiary households.

Due to the predominance of direct, specific interventions in nutrition for development, the health sector tends to own nutrition, with interventions customarily implemented through health programs. The premise that the agriculture sector should also be a vehicle for improved nutrition is intuitive, but this sector often delivers neither good nutrition nor food security to the most vulnerable in the population. The complex and multisectoral nature of malnutrition may explain why it has not been effectively addressed.

This report presents the findings from the baseline survey for the impact evaluation of the Tubaramure program, a Preventing Malnutrition in Children under 2 Approach (PM2A) program implemented in eastern Burundi. Tubaramure is a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Title II food aid development program1 funded out of the Public Law 480 Title II resources.

Data from the 2005 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) and the 2007 Zambia Demographic Health Survey (ZDHS) were analyzed to examine the association between World Health Organization (WHO) recommended IYCF indicators and nutritional status among children 0-23 months of age in Ethiopia and Zambia.  A total of 1810 and 2512 children within this age group from Ethiopia and Zambia, respectively, were included in the analysis. Exclusive breast-feeding among children 0-5.9 months of age is low  in both Ethiopia (43  %) and Zambia (51  %).