Evaluation of the Information on Nutrition, Food Security and Resilience for Decision Making (INFORMED) Programme


Book Description

The INFORMED programme, implemented by FAO from 2015 to 2019, was designed to contribute to “increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises and contributing to the reduction of food insecurity and malnutrition”. The programme’s increased focused on Early Warning for Early Action (EWEA) was very relevant to fill existing gaps with a comparative advantage for FAO in slow onset and food chain crises contexts. Promoting the use of pre-agreed plans and pre-identified anticipatory actions, the project effectively improved risk analysis and decision making, including through the Global Report on Food Crises, and increased access to appropriate financing instruments, while the EWEA country toolkit initial positive spinoffs remain to be built on.Efforts to support resilience measurement and analyses by applying the resilience index measurement and analysis (RIMA) methodology are relevant given the significant investments in resilience programming and the continuing methodological gaps. However, although RIMA provides a basis for creating evidence on resilience investments, and FAO has been an important pioneer in resilience measurement, a wider system supporting resilience analysis is needed, based on a range of methodologies, responding to the information needs of decision-makers. Also, RIMA baseline lacks sufficient detail to allow articulating the feasibility of possible response options and have a practical impact on planning decisions; it has not demonstrated its added value over pre-existing food security, nutrition and risk indicators to help target interventions, and is not well adapted as an impact evaluation tool.Assessing INFORMED results against its intention to support knowledge production and sharing, to promote the replication of good practices and circular learning, the evaluation questioned the choice of creating a new knowledge management platform versus adopting a collaborative approach building on similar initiatives’ strengths. Poor strategic choices represented a fundamental constraint to reach intended objectives, such as, an insufficient understanding of users explaining the difficulty to trace the uptake and use of knowledge products. Nevertheless, the evaluation recognized the progressive investments in knowledge management and sizeable accomplishments of a relatively small team.The evaluation suggests strengthening capacities for the production and dissemination of forecast, scenario-based early warning as a basis for early action; developing a corporate strategy for partnering to strengthen early warning system capacities at various levels; promoting the use of a toolkit of approaches and investing in a knowledge management function dedicated to capturing and disseminating lessons on the effectiveness of EWEA and resilience interventions.




Evaluation of FAO’s contribution to the humanitarian–development–peace nexus 2014–2020


Book Description

The Evaluation of FAO’s contribution to the humanitarian–development–peace (HDP) nexus revisits and brings together in a coherent narrative the many approaches of conflict management and peace-sustaining work carried out over the years on natural resources management and rights-based frameworks. At the same time, it analyses the body of work developed through emergency activities, in crisis and conflict contexts – shaped by the ever-stronger recognition of the need to focus on longer-term resilience. The evaluation recognizes that the heart of FAO’s work in prioritizing and implementing an HDP approach has been at country level and has pieced together a number of examples from across countries to inform the narrative and provide lessons. The main overarching message from the evaluation is that FAO is ideally placed to invest in a major corporate effort to mainstream and adopt HDP nexus ways of working as part of its organizational DNA.




The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018


Book Description

New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.




Synthesis of evaluations of FAO’s contributions in the Africa Region (2019–2021)


Book Description

This report is a synthesis of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Office of Evaluation (OED) on evaluations completed from 2019 to 2021 on FAO’s work in the Africa region. It documents FAO’s contribution to results, identifies gaps and emerging issues and lessons learned. The synthesis is organized around the themes of sustainable production and value chain development, food security and nutrition, climate change and natural resources, resilience to threats and crises, and gender equality and empowerment of women. The synthesis used the Programme Priority Areas of the Strategic Framework 2022–2031 to analyse FAO’s contribution to results, finding many positive examples in the Africa region. However, the sustainability of results is a challenge for the region, due to several factors, including capacity constraints of government partners and limitations of FAO project designs. Gaps and emerging issues include the need for guidance on ‘accelerators’ of results, addressing youth as a key priority and new approaches to partnerships with civil society and the private sector. Lessons learned include the importance of good project design, suitably capacitated decentralized offices, effective knowledge management and strategic and inclusive partnerships to achieve results.




Evaluation of the project "Strengthening Food Security Information and Early Warning System"


Book Description

The project “Strengthening Food Security Information and Early Warning System,” was a two-year (1 February 2019 – 31 January 2021), EUR 5.9 million project funded by the European Union to scale up the geographic coverage of Yemen’s Food Security Information System. The overall objective of the project was to increase systemic resilience to food crisis and climate change as well as improve food security and nutrition governance for decision-making at the national- and governorate-levels. The project is the latest phase in a series of EU-funded investments since in food security information systems in Yemen, with this project aiming to expand the geographic and technical coverage of previous phases. With these investments expected to continue in the future, the evaluation has aimed to provide accountability to project partners as well as the provision of evidence-based analyses and usable recommendations that feed into programming, policy and decision-making processes.




Climate Change, Food Security and Natural Resource Management


Book Description

This book contributes to the on-going debates on climate change by focusing on the SDGs and exploring linkages between environmental change and food security as well as the relevance and need to consider the management of natural resources, especially water, soil and forest. Compared to relevant existing publications, this book covers case studies that capture the everyday realities of the local people and how they react and adapt to similar situations in different geographical settings. Each case study presented in this book gives a particular message. The strength of this book lies in the fact that it covers the most neglected topics in climate negotiations in spite of the fact that these decide the fate of millions of people around the world, especially the developing countries. By presenting a collection of case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe, this book encourages cross-continental knowledge sharing. The scope of the book ranges from impacts to mitigation and from in-field experiments to policy implementation. It contributes to the existing knowledge on climate-food nexus and connects climate change to sectors it could impact directly. All chapters in this book emphasise local ownership of strategy processes, effective participation from all levels, and high-level commitment. Besides being relevant for the academicians and scholars working in the field of climate change, forest and agriculture, it aims to catch interest of the policy makers and practitioners to understand ground realities for appropriate action. It is also bound to make an impact on the Non-Governmental Organizations around the world and in the three different continents that this book covers, considering the indigenous and local issues highlighted in this book.




The Federal Republic of Nigeria Resilience Strategy 2021–2023


Book Description

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed this three-year strategy to strengthen resilience of agriculture-based livelihoods in Nigeria under recurring threats from both conflict and natural hazard-induced disasters to better withstand shocks and thrive. It integrates the pathways for resilience through four main outcome areas. The first one is the strengthening of the national institutions and their entities for disaster risk reduction, natural resources management and food crisis prevention and management in the agriculture sector. Secondly, it aims to inform agriculture-based livelihood interventions with reliable data, analysis and a well-established early warning system against known and emerging risks and hazards, for enhanced food security. Besides, the strategy aims to promote diversified, resilient and inclusive agriculture-based livelihood systems and also to improve and protect food security and nutrition, and agriculture-based livelihoods of crisis-affected populations.




The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020


Book Description

Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.




South Sudan Resilience Strategy 2019–2021


Book Description

The resilience of communities in South Sudan has declined and continued to be eroded since the eruption of conflict in late 2013. Compounded by repeated outbreaks of violent conflict, the deterioration of the food security situation and subsequent economic shocks have negatively affected households’ coping capacities and livelihoods. Communities dependent on agriculture have seen their productive assets depleted, looted and destroyed, limiting their ability to recover and increasing their reliance on external aid. At the time of writing this Strategy, two thirds of the population cannot access the food needed to cover their daily needs. The FAO Resilience Strategy 2019–2021 lays the foundation for a multi-track approach to strengthening resilience, depending on needs, vulnerability and access. Drawing from the experience gained from implementing the previous FAO Resilience Strategy (2016–2018), FAO has incorporated lessons learned, as well as the latest knowledge in the field of resilience, while responding to the changing context and priorities in South Sudan. This Strategy seeks to strengthen the foundation of FAO’s resilience activities in South Sudan, and will guide the design of FAO programmes to enhance their relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and impact.




Evaluation of the project “Developing capacity for strengthening food security and nutrition in selected countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia"


Book Description

Caucasus and Central Asian countries are strongly committed to promoting food security and nutrition among their populations. Although good progress has been made by most countries in the region, food insecurity and malnutrition remain relatively high and greater efforts are needed to address their root causes. Moreover, wide gaps in terms of income, food security and nutrition, and access to social services have caused substantial migration from rural areas to neighbouring countries. The FAO project on developing capacity for strengthening food security and nutrition in selected countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia aims to promote cross-sectoral collaboration between agriculture, health, education and social protection sectors by carrying out six pilot projects in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. These pilots build capacities at field and governmental level and provide an evidence base to build political commitment and coherence for the development of policies, legislations and programmes at the country, regional and global levels. The evaluation concluded that overall the project has been successful. The building of operational capacity among stakeholders and beneficiaries is processing well through the ongoing pilots, while high-level coordination and policy dialogue, and the contribution to global policy processes and frameworks need more time to materialize. The evaluation makes a number of recommendations to further enhance project design, implementation, monitoring and sustainability, and proposes a second phase of at least 1-2 years to consolidate and expand achievements.