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A comment on the WFP SENAC Comprehensive Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis
04 December 2006
Major crises have been repeatedly missed, for example drought in the West African Sahel (1968-73), the Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s, and the last five years of famine in both Malawi and Niger. In many cases, even where food relief has been supplied and overt starvation has not occurred, the evidence on which relief decisions were based appears to have been largely circumstantial.
Over the same period there have been repeated international investments to improve the performance of early warning and assessment systems (‘nutritional surveillance’ in 1974, US FEWSNET, FAO GIEWS, NGO early warning initiatives, the WFP VAM in the late-1980s). Currently in the southern Africa region there are two initiatives, the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP) and the World Food Programme (WFP) ‘Strengthening Emergency Needs Assessment Capacity’ (SENAC) project.
One component of SENAC, the ‘Comprehensive Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis’ (CVAA) comprises a series of national household surveys intended to be used for the pre-crisis analysis of food insecurity and vulnerability, through the Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis (CFSVA) which is used to improve the reliability of emergency needs assessments and to inform the development of monitoring and early warning systems.
In a recent paper, John Seaman of Evidence for Development sets out a view of a specification for an operationally useful assessment system. It is suggested that: i) the problem to be assessed is not exclusively ‘emergencies’, but the more general problem of anticipating - in quantitative, spatial and temporal terms - the relationship between changes, large or small, to the economic context (chiefly production and price) and poverty and food security; ii) assessment systems should be designed primarily to meet the information needs of governments and donors, and must therefore provide information in terms which are ‘transparent’ and allow decisions to be made confidently; iii) the methodological possibilities of achieving this are limited to a ‘livelihoods’ approach, where outstanding technical problems largely relate to obtaining better information on household income and improving spatial resolution; and iv) as assessment systems must be maintained over long periods and require information inputs from a range of government and non-government sources, these systems must be run wherever possible by government and seek to operate within realistic budgetary and skill constraints. Lastly it is suggested that given the severe implications of technical failure, methods should be adequately evaluated before being brought into use.
The CVAA surveys and the CFSVA methodology are set against these criteria and are found wanting. That is, i) the methods of data collection particularly for household income are likely to be unreliable; ii) the methods of analysis, which are partly statistical and partly based on judgements, will not lead to ‘transparency’ of the analytic process, to information on which decisions can be confidently made, or possibly even to accurate estimates; and iii) the overall approach is unsustainably costly.
It is concluded that these methods will not change the status quo: even the previous meeting of the SENAC Advisory Group proposed a ‘moratorium on future CFSVAs’. WFP should clarify the relationship between its CVAA work and other established work in the region, publish a case detailing the data and the method of analysis relative to each of the declared objectives, and indicate how the proposed methods are to be evaluated, ideally by an impartial third party.
Image Credit: Tristan Clements
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