MVAM: THE BLOG: Recent Episodes
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Every day, the World Food Programme’s real-time food security monitoring systems remotely collect household-level data on core food security metrics, as well as key drivers of food insecurity. This data is automatically processed and made available through WFP’s HungerMapLIVE, a global hunger monitoring system that draws from real-time monitoring and artificial intelligence to track hunger […]
What are the Climate Insights? Climate variability and extremes such as droughts, floods, storms, and the delayed start of rainy seasons are among the key drivers of food insecurity. Weather-related events can directly affect crop production and livestock, disrupt food supply chains, cause food price hikes, and even lead to severe food crises and conflicts […]
With a state of emergency recently declared in Somalia, we’re coming to you with the latest insights and near real-time data from WFP’s HungerMapLIVE. Currently, Somalia continues to experience severe rainfall shortages and a worsening food security situation, with rising levels of insufficient food consumption observed across the nation. When compared to just two weeks […]
By Anna Gustilo Ong In the world of food security surveys, quality assurance is a crucial yet broad concept. Quality assurance can span a range of factors such as understanding adequate sample sizes or considering the impact bias can have on the data. Without considering these factors, the risk of injecting ‘noise’ into the data […]
As this year’s Ramadan period approached, decreases in the number of people reporting insufficient food consumption were anticipated. Why? Because diets typically become more diverse during this festive period as people often consume more nutritious food after breaking their fast. Additionally, this declining trend has occurred in previous years, in countries [where Ramadan is celebrated […]
As hunger continues to rise across the globe, WFP is responding to increasingly complex and rapidly evolving emergencies. Protracted conflict and episodes of violence, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate-driven disasters highlight the dynamic nature of food security, and the need for updated information to inform effective response. To continuously collect and deliver […]
It’s just been over a year since we launched the HungerMapLIVE, WFP’s global hunger monitoring system. Since then, we’ve rapidly expanded our near real-time food security monitoring systems as part of the response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and developed new data products such as the Hunger and COVID-19 Snapshots and Global Insights and Key Trends. […]
Lockdowns, quarantines, state of emergencies, and closed borders ebbed and flowed across 2020 – all of which alluding to the extent of movement restrictions and physical access constraints that humanitarians would have to work through to understand who is in need of assistance, and how have their lives and livelihoods been affected. Movement restrictions and […]
We welcomed 2020 with an aim to scale up our continuous food security monitoring systems, doubling our footprint from 15 countries at the start of the year to 30 by the end of it. We collect thousands of data on a daily basis through live calls conducted by call centres across all 15 countries. This […]
During a pandemic, timely information is a crucial resource. As the Hunger Map LIVE already tracks food security as it is now in over 90 countries, we’ve been exploring how we can extend this system to monitor the evolution of COVID-19 as well. By integrating COVID-19 data into the Hunger Map LIVE, we can equip […]
By Kusum Hachhethu, World Food Programme
A few weeks ago, we were at the World Food Programme (WFP) Innovation’s Accelerator in Munich to re-imagine the way we understand and measure vulnerability.
The Nutri-Grip team at the WFP Innovation Accelerator in Munich
The ultimate objective of humanitarian and development assistance is to alleviate suffering and improve people’s wellbeing. To do so, humanitarian agencies like WFP first need to identify who are the most vulnerable and in need of urgent assistance. They also need to measure the success of their programmes in improving people’s wellbeing.
In times of increasing needs and limited humanitarian resources, it’s even more important to ensure that we’re making every single dollar count – that our resources only get to those people really in need.
Today, we rely on surveys to decide who should get humanitarian assistance. These assessments are complex and could also be vulnerable to response bias. Even when nutrition and health outcome indicators are included, it is costly and complex to measure all members of the household.
In other words, our surveys and assessment tools don’t fully capture information on individual vulnerability. I personally have spent the last seven years trying to understand and capture vulnerability due to food insecurity and malnutrition, seeing its complexities first-hand. I’m sure those in the same field would agree with the innate challenges that come with trying to measure such dynamic aspect of human wellbeing.
The heart of the matter is one fundamental question: who is the most vulnerable amongst those in need?
We use cutting edge tools to assess household’s food security, livelihood conditions, and nutritional status to determine their vulnerability. However, we also realize that today’s technologies have opened new methodological avenues that will help us address some of the limitations we currently experience.
WFP/Mohammed Awadh
Household surveys often don’t capture intra-household differences in vulnerability. This matters because vulnerability also varies within a household, some members are more vulnerable than other due to factors like gender and age. Sometimes, we ask a community to identify their most vulnerable. But what happens when a part of the community is being discriminated? Things like racial, religious or political discrimination can sometimes exclude the most vulnerable even before the search has begun.
Lastly, when we conduct nutrition assessments or surveys, we’re inevitably capturing glimpses of a situation. We may have a comprehensive understanding of food security in January then again in November, but the challenge is that hunger is dynamic, it’s fragile. Hunger changes at a rate that we struggle to match since nutritional assessments and surveys are costly, both in time and resources – and always subject to constraints; be it logistics, finances, security, and the like.
Every previous situation and experience informs our next move. So in this case, taking a step further meant redefining how to understand and measure vulnerability.
WFP/George Fominyen
We realised that we need to start seeing vulnerability holistically, not just as a state of hunger or food insecurity but rather, a state of wellbeing.
So, what if I told you that we can assess your physical wellbeing by testing how strong your muscle strength is?
As we attempted to redefine vulnerability, we found that nutritional deprivation impairs our muscle strength early on, even before the loss of muscle mass. This discovery meant that something as simple as measuring the strength of your muscle can provide an early indication of vulnerability due to nutritional deprivations. The best part is that upper muscle strength can easily be assessed by measuring hand grip strength, which is a measure of muscular strength in hands and forearms and a proxy for overall muscle strength.
With this discovery, we’ve teamed up with the New York University School of Public Health. Together, we are developing a simple, non-invasive method of assessing individual-level physical wellbeing in the humanitarian setting by measuring the hand grip strength.
WFP/Marwa Awad
This non-invasive and simple method only takes 2-3 minutes per individual, helping us save time and money. Simultaneously, it enables us to quickly identify those who are vulnerable within a population. As a result, the data we capture is also more robust – capturing the specificities of each individual within a household.
With this objective marker of physical wellbeing, WFP and more so other humanitarian agencies and governments can revolutionize targeting. This ensures that they are effectively using their limited resources by better identifying those who truly need humanitarian assistance.
This individual-level information on vulnerability, when coupled with household-level data on food security and livelihood-related indictors will also provide a new opportunity for humanitarian agencies to comprehensively monitor and better assess the impact of their interventions in improving people’s wellbeing.
But before we operationalize this tool with the humanitarian context, we need first to validate this method. In partnership with NYU, we’re designing a multi-country study including different population groups to validate and operationalize this method within the humanitarian context. The study will validate hand grip strength against anthropometric nutrition indicators and assess the correlation between hand grip strength and key food security, nutrition and livelihood indicators.
Sometimes, innovation can mean reimagining new purposes for existing things. Hand grip strength has long been used in clinical settings for assessing physical wellbeing. By operationalizing this for humanitarian settings, we hope that we can revolutionize the way we do humanitarian targeting, marking the shift of assessing individual-level vulnerability and seeing it not just as a state of food insecurity and hunger, but rather as a state of wellbeing.
WFP’s Kusum Hachhethu pitched the project at the WFP Innovation Accelerator in February 2020 (WFP/Paul Günther)
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