Presentation by Derek Headey, IFPRI at 2013 Global Hunger Index Launch event held at IFPRI on October 18, 2013. "The Challenge of Hunger: Building Resilience to Achieve Food And Nutrition Security".
2. Why a Global Hunger Index?
• To capture different dimensions of hunger
• To raise awareness of regional and country
differences in hunger
• To show progress over time
• To help learn from successes and failures
• To provide incentives to act
• To focus on one major hunger-related topic every
year
3. The GHI measures three dimensions of hunger
• Undernourishment
• Child underweight
• Child mortality
GHI
score
Proportion of
the population
that is
undernourished
(%)
=
+
Prevalence of
underweight in
children under
age five (%)
3
+
Mortality rate
of children
under age five
(%)
4. The GHI ranks countries on a 100-point scale
• An increase in a country’s GHI
score means the hunger
situation is worsening; a
decrease indicates
improvement in the country’s
hunger situation.
• Minimum (zero) and
maximum (100) values are not
observed in practice.
5. About the 2013 GHI
• 120 developing countries
• reflects data from 2008 to 2012—the most
recent country-level data available
• The 2013 world GHI fell by 34 percent from the
1990 world GHI, from a score of 20.8 to 13.8
• Plenty of success stories: Bangladesh, Cambodia,
Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Rwanda, Vietnam
• But 19 countries still “alarming” or extremely so
• South Asia’s progress has slowed down
8. Understanding resilience
for food and nutrition security
• This year’s special topic (chapter) was
“resilience” in a food & nutrition security context
• Very topical . . .
o Global food, fuel and financial crises
o Climate change to increase incidence of shocks
o Major “natural” disasters in the Horn & Sahel
• Cognizance that we can do better in bridging the
remaining divide between relief & development
9. Understanding resilience
for food and nutrition security
• What is resilience?
• Is it new? How is it related to existing concepts?
• Is it useful in a food & nutrition security setting?
• What does it mean for strategizing, programming,
capacity building, monitoring, evaluation, research?
• What do we know about building resilience based
on previous experience?
11. Resilience as a dynamic concept:
3 hypothetical pastoral communities
12. Academic perspectives on resilience
• Academically, the new resilience paradigm has
close ties to the vulnerability paradigm (lessons!)
• Debate about which paradigm better captures the
importance of human agency, power relations, etc
• Isn’t yet a universal definition of resilience
• Concerns of negative forms of resilience
(stubbornness; negative coping strategies)
• Concerns that “bouncing back” isn’t enough
13. Policy perspectives on resilience
• On the policy front, what’s new?
• Unifying concept for achieving relief & development
• Acceleration of an existing trend?
o Foreign food aid>>>locally sourced food or cash
o Conditional cash transfers, productive safety nets
o “Relief” agencies engaging more in development
• But perceptions that existing approaches are still
inefficient or too small
14. Policy perspectives on resilience
• How would we redesign development practices if we
were serious about achieving resilience?
• Strategic changes: development strategies & goals
• Operational changes: between and within agencies,
national & subnational govts, line ministries, etc
• Portfolio changes: Focus more on prevention?
• Experimentation: safety nets and beyond
15. Measuring and evaluating resilience
“Measurement drives diagnosis and response” (Barrett 2010)
• Resilience is dynamic, but measured with snapshots
• Irrespective of how we ultimately define resilience,
we must have high frequency surveillance systems
• Build on nutrition surveillance systems, such as HKI’s
long-running NSS in Bangladesh
• Multi-purpose: early warning, real-time welfare
monitoring, impact evaluation, learning
• Accurate diagnosis; timely & appropriate response
17. Flood in July and
August prolonged
hungry season
Regular but intense
hunger seasons: AprilAugust
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
1998
2000
Dec
Oct
Jun
Apr
Feb
Dec
Oct
Aug
1999
Aug
Jun
Apr
Feb
Dec
Oct
Aug
Jun
Apr
0
Feb
% of children suffering from wasting
20
18. Focusing on success stories
• One of the motivations of the GHI
• What sorts of communities, programs, policies and
countries have had success in building resilience?
• What are the roles of different sectors in building
resilience?
Agriculture, nutrition, health, education, infrastructu
re, water, sanitation?
• What are the relevant economic, social and political
lessons?
19. Trends in food aid receipts, 1988-2011
45
Food aid (kg) per capita in rural areas
40
1988-91
1992-95
1996-99
2000-03
2004-07
2008-11
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Horn of Africa
Sahel
Malawi
Zambia
Bangladesh
20. • Report available in
English, German, French, an
d Italian
• Download from
www.ifpri.org
www.welthungerhilfe.de
www.concern.net
• Or download the report on
Google Play, Google
Books, Amazon, and iTunes.
• See the report and related
content through a free IFPRI
mobile app.
Notas del editor
Global averages mask dramatic differences among regions and countries.Compared with the 1990 score, the 2013 GHI is 23 percent lower in Africa south of the Sahara,34 percent lower in South Asia, and28 percent lower in the Near East and North Africa.Progress in East and Southeast Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean was even more remarkable, where GHI scores feel by 50 percent or more.
The lower the intensity of the shock, the more likely the household, community, or system will be able to resist it effectively, absorbing its impacts without major changes. A somewhat larger shock or stressor may require incremental adaptive changes, such as new farming techniques or taking out loans.Much larger shocks may warrant even bigger changes that permanently alter the system or structure in question. For example, droughts in the Horn of Africa may push people out of pastoralism and into sedentary agriculture or urban occupations because they can no longer rebuilt their herds.
This slide shows how in theory three hypothetical African pastoral communities fare before, during, and after drought.Community A is relatively resilient. It has three assets that make it resilient:A large cattle herd (large enough to rebuild after drought)The ability to graze and water its animals over a large and diverse geographical area gives it the adaptive capacity to move its animals to less drought-affected areas (changing its migration routes, if needed)Remittances sent home from communitiy members who left to work in the capital city after earlier droughts have increased the community’s transformative capacity. Community B is on the path to increasing vulnerability.This community is less able to absorb the impacts of the drought by moving cattle and rebuilding its herd. It may resort to violence to acquire herds, grazing land, and water resources of other groups.Community C is becoming even poorer and more vulnerable.When drought strikes, this community does not have many options. It has a much smaller herd and more limited grazing and watering mobility (reduced by a mix of land enclosures, tribal conflict, and irrigation developments). It becomes dependent on emergency relief and members switch to a new, less lucrative livelihood.
Are there gaps in strategies? Is there the right balance between preventative measures and cures? Are agencies and partnerships structured in the best possible way? Do we need to scale up safety nets?
Yes, we have early warning systems of a sort
Food aid receipts can be used as a proxy for resilience. Whereas food aid receipts remain high in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, successes in Bangladesh, Malawi, and Zambia show that building resilience within a generation is a real possibility.The data reflect the standard narrative of “permanent crisis” in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, where food aid receipts were roughly as large in 2008-2011 as they were about 20 years ago.In contrast, Malawi and Zambia have seen improvements in recent years due in part to controversial fertilizer subsidy programs that expanded maize production.Bangladesh has made great progress in reducing its dependency on food aid.Its 85% drop in food aid receipts from the early 1990s to 2008-2011 is consistent with the country’s dramatic economic and social achievements, which include rapid agricultural growth (through new crop varieties and other modern inputs), sharp reductions in fertility rates, dramatic expansion of education (especially for females), a microfinance revolution, and sustained job creation outside agriculture.While we have much to learn about why some vulnerable regions make so little progress, some shock-prone countries seems to have advanced. SSuccess stories like Bangladesh, Malawi, and Zambia show that building individual, community, and national resilience within a generation is a real possibility.