Dear Emile, You are raising two extremely important issues. Regarding your second question, I think that the situation is heterogeneous. Weakness and challenges vary from country to country, but there are certain specificities that have lot to do with lack of financial and well trained (and incentivized) human resources, as you correctly pointed out in your blog. In countries were nationally statistical offices are weaker, the challenges are quite important, especially with respect to the amount of work that the Agenda 2030 is putting on them. According to me, the result will really depend on a) the possibility and willingness of the Governments in investing in data collection, b) the financial and technical assistance that national statistical offices will be able to attract from regional and international organizations. With respect to this second point and your first question, I would like to share with you my personal perspective as food security monitoring expert. I am working in the Food Security and Nutrition Statistics team, part of the Statistics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The objective of the team is to provide technical assistance to countries in monitoring food security and nutrition, including two SDG indicators for which this team is the focal unit, namely the “Prevalence of Undernourishment (SDG 2.1.1)” and the “Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the population, based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (SDG 2.1.2)”. There are many considerations to be made when choosing which indicator to use for monitoring food insecurity, thus what kind of data to collect to derive the indicator. An indicator should be easy to use, provide timeliness information, be informed by data that are easy to collect (cost effective). But not only. As you rightly mentioned, it should provide valid and reliable information. These characteristics are very difficult to find in indicators aiming to “measure” food insecurity. This is the reason why the Food Security and Nutrition Statistics team of FAO in 2013 launched the Voices of the Hungry project (http://www.fao.org/in-action/voices-of-the-hungry/en/#.XRXngegzbcs) that brought to the development of a new tool called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) (now SDG indicator 2.1.2). This new tool is according to me the best answer to your question. It is direct, easy to use, low cost, and statistically sound. It also allows distinguishing between severity levels, to disaggregate the results and compare results among countries and in time. But what if the indicator is informed by bad quality data? This is the main advantage of this tool, it is statistically sound! It allows performing a statistical validation of the collected data and – only if the information passes the validation – it can be used to derive estimates of prevalence of food insecurity in the population. This indicator is relatively new, but in less than two years the FIES module, 8 questions on access to food informing the tool, has been already included in more than 50 nationally representative surveys worldwide and 60 more countries have already plans in place to include it in their national surveys. This is according to me the demonstration of the power of this tool and an example on how we can monitor food security in SDG era producing valid, reliable, timeliness and cost effective information. Filippo
Filippo Gheri
Food Security Monitoring Expert Food and Agriculture OrganizationDear Emile, You are raising two extremely important issues. Regarding your second question, I think that the situation is heterogeneous. Weakness and challenges vary from country to country, but there are certain specificities that have lot to do with lack of financial and well trained (and incentivized) human resources, as you correctly pointed out in your blog. In countries were nationally statistical offices are weaker, the challenges are quite important, especially with respect to the amount of work that the Agenda 2030 is putting on them. According to me, the result will really depend on a) the possibility and willingness of the Governments in investing in data collection, b) the financial and technical assistance that national statistical offices will be able to attract from regional and international organizations. With respect to this second point and your first question, I would like to share with you my personal perspective as food security monitoring expert. I am working in the Food Security and Nutrition Statistics team, part of the Statistics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The objective of the team is to provide technical assistance to countries in monitoring food security and nutrition, including two SDG indicators for which this team is the focal unit, namely the “Prevalence of Undernourishment (SDG 2.1.1)” and the “Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the population, based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (SDG 2.1.2)”. There are many considerations to be made when choosing which indicator to use for monitoring food insecurity, thus what kind of data to collect to derive the indicator. An indicator should be easy to use, provide timeliness information, be informed by data that are easy to collect (cost effective). But not only. As you rightly mentioned, it should provide valid and reliable information. These characteristics are very difficult to find in indicators aiming to “measure” food insecurity. This is the reason why the Food Security and Nutrition Statistics team of FAO in 2013 launched the Voices of the Hungry project (http://www.fao.org/in-action/voices-of-the-hungry/en/#.XRXngegzbcs) that brought to the development of a new tool called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) (now SDG indicator 2.1.2). This new tool is according to me the best answer to your question. It is direct, easy to use, low cost, and statistically sound. It also allows distinguishing between severity levels, to disaggregate the results and compare results among countries and in time. But what if the indicator is informed by bad quality data? This is the main advantage of this tool, it is statistically sound! It allows performing a statistical validation of the collected data and – only if the information passes the validation – it can be used to derive estimates of prevalence of food insecurity in the population. This indicator is relatively new, but in less than two years the FIES module, 8 questions on access to food informing the tool, has been already included in more than 50 nationally representative surveys worldwide and 60 more countries have already plans in place to include it in their national surveys. This is according to me the demonstration of the power of this tool and an example on how we can monitor food security in SDG era producing valid, reliable, timeliness and cost effective information. Filippo