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Outcome Monitoring and the World Food Program’s Community Household Surveillance Survey

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Facilitator: Arif Rashid, TOPS Monitoring and Evaluation Senior Specialist, TANGO

Presenter: Lara Da Silva Carrilho, Vulnerability Assessment and Mapping Officer and Coordinator of the Bi-Annual Community and Household Surveillance System, World Food Program (WFP)

Content: During this session, participants were introduced to the Community and Household Surveillance (CHS) system developed and implemented by WFP. The CHS system provides information on the food security and nutrition situation at critical times of the year. A specific feature of the system is that it can measure short and longer-term effects (outcomes) of food assistance interventions by capturing comparable data from beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. The system has been tested over many years in seven countries in the Southern African Development Community region.

The main objective of CHS is to help WFP and its partners take an informed decision to develop and refine strategies to enhance household food security status (e.g., unconditional or conditional transfers). It enables analysis of food security and nutrition trends over time and makes it possible to assess the impact of different program categories and transfer modalities. The system could be used to measure outcomes of blanket nutrition feeding programs of children under-5 and under-2. In addition to outcome monitoring, the system also covers post-distribution monitoring information, including household perceptions on targeting, access to assistance, satisfaction with the quality, and use of food.

Discussion: Although there are a few indicators in use in the CHS survey that are also used in FFP-supported food security projects (i.e., dietary diversity), participants pointed out that there are opportunities to streamline the food security indicators across organizations, thus increasing the usability of data. For example, WFP uses the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and Coping Strategies Index (CSI), which could also be used in FFP-supported projects, while WFP could adopt the Household Hunger Scale. In addition, participants requested that WFP include FFP partners in training and data collection exercises worldwide and in harmonizing tools with the food security implementers.

 

The Way Forward: Recommendations were made in four areas: 

Training

  • Provide training on how to monitor data for improved program implementation

Information sharing

  • WFP country offices should take responsibility for providing district specific information
  • More access to information on food availability in the household
  • Web based platform to view and access WFP information
  • Put tools and methodologies on shared site

Tools and Resources

  • Collect and analyze tools that WFP is using for CHS, and advise how partners can use the tools to end their process monitoring
  • Harmonization of tools from different organizations

Processes

  • Further discussion on FCS, CSI Indicators and link with the HDDS and MAHFP and HUNGER SCORE
  • Discussions on data verification methods for large volume data
  • Decentralize analysis of data

Donor Policy and Practice

  • USAID could share their database and CHS data with MYAP implementers (see info sharing above)
  • Obtain government buy-in for inclusion of Household Hunger Score questions in data collection and coordination of malnutrition data collection with government health departments.
  • Encourage coordinated activities with WFP, e.g., include FFP partners in training and data collection exercises worldwide