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New Approaches for Measuring Household Food Insecurity and Poverty: Adaptation of the U.S. Household Food Security Scale to Developing Country Contexts
See also: Indicator Guides for Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) for Measurement of Household Food Access and Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning (MAHFP) for Measurement of Household Food Access and Measuring Household Food Insecurity Workshop Report, April 2004
There is strong demand among Title II-supported private voluntary organizations for a relatively simple, methodologically rigorous measure of household food security-particularly the access dimension-that can be used to guide, monitor, and evaluate programs. During the past four years FANTA has supported activities to validate the US Household Food Security Scale (HFSS) for use in developing countries and test its usefulness as an impact indicator for the access component of food security in program evaluations. The underlying concept of the HFSS approach is that food insecurity in the United States is a measurable experience that can be described and analyzed to categorize households by level of food insecurity. The set of activities implemented by FANTA seeks to answer whether this is universally true and whether a generic measurement tool could be developed for application across countries.
FANTA funded two multi-year field validation studies that used the HFSS approach to develop experiential food insecurity scales and validate them primarily as impact indicators for the access component of household food security. The studies were implemented by Cornell University in the Title II food security program areas of Africare in Burkina Faso and by Tufts University in the Title II food security program areas of World Vision in Bangladesh (see Measuring Food Insecurity: Going Beyond Indicators of Income and Anthropometry below). The objectives of the studies were to develop a household food access measure (Household Food Insecurity Scale: HFIS) based on locally recognized behaviors that distinguish food insecurity in developing countries, test the HFIS's relationship to conventional indicators of food insecurity (such as income or food consumption), and test the HFIS's performance and sensitivity to change related to program impact.
The Burkina Faso and Bangladesh studies showed that the HFSS approach to developing an experiential food insecurity scale can be applied successfully in different, developing country contexts. The food insecurity questionnaire proved to be a simple tool that could be used in these settings by organizations to assess, evaluate, or monitor the access component of household food security. Both studies indicate that the experiential household food insecurity scale (HFIS) not only measures the prevalence of food insecurity, but also gives an indication of its severity and how that may change over time. While the validation studies themselves were time-consuming and elaborate, the adaptation of this approach to new settings should be relatively easy. FANTA is now developing a generic, universally applicable measurement instrument that can be used to construct an experiential HFIS in a range of country and cultural contexts.
Measuring Food
Insecurity: Going Beyond Indicators of Income and Anthropometry [388 kb]
Measuring Household Food Insecurity Workshop, April 2004
