28 September - 2 October 2015, Johannesburg, South Africa

The aim of this workshop is to reinforce the capacity of countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to generate food security statistics by applying updated methodologies to national household and individual surveys.   

Food Security Information Systems are crucial to formulate policies and programmes that improve food security actions targeted to the most food insecure. Country-specific priorities are successful only if based upon comprehensive, improved and regularly updated data and a sound statistical analysis.

The main objective of the Regional Demonstration Workshop is to expose participants from National Statistical Offices, statisticians from Universities, as well as from Regional Economic Communities, to the FAO standards, methods and tools to derive food security statistics at the household and individual level, by analyzing food consumption and/or acquisition data, and experience-based food security scale data.

''National Household Surveys (NHS) collect food consumption data as part of their broader enquiry on expenditure and poverty; they do not have food security as primary objective of investigation. Nonetheless, food consumption/acquisition data – if properly collected and analyzed – allow deriving food security statistics at national and sub-national level, thus playing a critical role in informing the policy design process.'' FAO statistics

As part of the ‘’Voices of the Hungry Project’’, FAO has recently developed the Food Insecurity Experience Scale module (FIES). It is an innovative statistical tool aimed at producing, in a cost effective and rapid way, a direct measure of access to food by individual.  The FIES builds on successful experiences in North and Latin America and includes a survey module to collect the data, the set of analytic methods used to process them, and a global standard of reference to compare the measures obtained in different countries and contexts.

Participants to the workshop will be familiarized with the: 

- FAO methodology for computing the Prevalence of Undernourishment (MDG indicator 1.9) 

- FAO Suite of Food Security Indicators 

- Food Insecurity Experience Scale module (FIES – Voices of the Hungry Project)

The minimum data requirements for generating food security statistics from food consumption data collected in a National Household Surveys (NHS) will be addressed. Exposure to the software ADePT-FSM is also part of the agenda, as well as the concept and technical details underpinning experience-based food security measurement, upon which the Food Insecurity Experience Scale module (FIES) is based.