FAOR opens Round 24 of the Food Security and Nutrition Monitoring System in Juba
Yesterday, the FAO Representative, Meshack Malo, opened the 24th round of the Food Security and Nutrition Monitoring System (FSNMS) at the Aron International Hotel in the presence of WFP's Acting Country Director, Simon Cammelbeeck, UNICEF’s Nutrition Information Manager, Ismail Kassim, and the Director General for Planning in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, John Pangech.
The five-day workshop is being attended by 70 trainers from FAO, UNICEF, WFP and the Government. After the workshop, they will be deployed to the field to train enumerators on how to collection food security and nutrition data at household level in the remote areas of South Sudan.
The FSNMS is a nationwide, rural-based and randomly sampled household survey which employs nearly 500 enumerators. The 23rd round achieved the highest level of geographic and household coverage ever, providing data for all counties in the country and directly assessing over 8,500 households and 9,000 children under five years old across rural South Sudan.
“Collecting good data and information through the FSNMS is vital to help profile people at the household level, but also to engage with leaders and decision makers, but this is not enough,” Mr. Malo said. “We need to give a face to the issue of hunger,” he added; “saying that over 8 million people are hungry is not as effective as showing a malnourished brother or a mother,” Mr. Malo continued.
The FSNMS seeks to provide indicative food security findings for the rural areas of all 78 former counties and indicative nutritional status findings for tri-county groupings, in order to inform the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis and programmatic prioritization.
Mr. Pangech, for his part, stressed on the importance of the leadership of the Government in data collection and in the overall humanitarian sector.