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RHVP is now widely known in southern Africa and beyond by its acronym - very rarely do the personnel associated with the programme have to elaborate what it stands for - the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme. As RHVP approaches the end of a 3-year phase, it is time to stand back and take stock of progress and look to the future. Is the programme name still appropriate? I would argue that it's not - that a preoccupation with hunger as an outcome is constraining, and that it should actually be the Regional Vulnerability Programme. Here's why...

When DFID put out a call for tender for a regional programme in 2004 it was to address the recurrent situations of food insecurity that plagued southern Africa. Despite monumental leaps forward in the understanding of the drivers of food insecurity - from a crisis of production to a much broader problem of entitlement, following Sen's theories - recurrent droughts continued to precipitate crises in the region, with hunger and famine widespread amongst the countries of Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe in the early 21^st century. The Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme was envisioned to build evidence on the causes of vulnerability and efforts to ameliorate it, strengthen vulnerability assessment, and provide advice to policy-makers on how to tackle situations of hunger and chronic vulnerability.

It is clearly the case that hunger and food insecurity remain major development problems in many countries, including southern Africa, and when I say hunger is not the issue I do not at all mean to diminish this reality. But following the substantial literature on food security arising out of the paradigm shift brought about by Sen, there is now increasing recognition that vulnerability is the root cause, and hunger merely the outcome. To focus on hunger, therefore, runs a risk of ignoring the root causes of vulnerability and providing misplaced advice.

The proponents of the programme in DFID were clearly aware of this situation and wanted to promote a shift away from these situations where reactive emergency food aid is required to ameliorate hunger, towards one where the root causes of vulnerability are addressed. Debates have progressed over the past three years, and a broad notion of social protection is gaining momentum as a way of reducing vulnerability. Building on previous notions of social safety nets required to maintain livelihoods in the event of various income risks, social transfers are now heralded as a way of not only helping those affected by shocks to get back to their "starting point" reality, but also to get ahead. RHVP has played a very active role in building evidence on the existence and impacts of various social transfer programmes, and raised awareness within a variety of stakeholder groups, including civil society, the media, parliamentarians, and citizens in each of the 6 countries in which we work. So in that sense RHVP's activities have been focused more on the vulnerability side of the equation, with hunger reduction as one of the outcomes. Why, then, am I advocating a change in name?

The beauty of the notion of vulnerability is that it allows recognition that vulnerable situations resulting in hunger are brought about by multiple stresses in the developing world environment. Climate variability and weather extremes such as droughts are one major driving force, and indeed one whose future is projected to worsen under climate change, but this both intersects with, and in many cases is reinforced by, other drivers of vulnerability which can have other adverse outcomes. The alarming HIV and AIDS pandemic, particularly prevalent in southern Africa, is another driving force of vulnerability, because as well as leading to adverse health and wellbeing outcomes it also precipitates situation of hunger. Trade liberalisation and the uneven effects of globalisation are another - whilst farm productivity is affected by the vagaries of climate, farmers' livelihoods are also being affected by their access to markets and the pressure on prices caused by liberalisation and trade regimes, and the increasing demand for biofuels. As well as leaps in the understanding of food security over the past three years, the areas of climate change, HIV and AIDS and globalisation have similarly developed rapidly.

Throughout its three years of operation, RHVP has frequently had encounters with academics, practitioners and policy-makers working in these fields who have identified similar issues and objectives. Interactions and opportunities for working together are, however, limited to our core missions - and in RHVP's case that is restricted to hunger and vulnerability. In 2006, for example, DFID put out another call for tender for a regional programme looking at the impacts of climate change across southern Africa and potential for adaptation - an area which has many conceptual overlaps with RHVP in terms of assessing the causes of vulnerability to multiple stresses. Although in the current context there is much scope for collaboration, would it not be more effective to just have one Regional Vulnerability Programme which can address all these root causes of vulnerability and how they interact with each other?