Food Security
The FSAU bases its understanding of food, nutrition, and livelihood security on four key dimensions: Access, Availability, Utilization, and Stability. The FSAU has developed a Food Security Analysis System (FSAS) that holistically integrates both conceptual and analytical aspects of its work, and is underpinned by livelihoods analysis.
Key aspects of livelihoods analysis include an understanding of:
. livelihood strategies (e.g., food/income sources, expenditures, coping strategies)
. livelihood assets (human, financial, physical, natural, and social capital)
. integrated sectoral analysis
. multiple scales of analysis including macro-, meso-, and intrahousehold-level dynamics
. proximate to underlying causes
. resistance
. resilience
. risk management
A
special emphasis of the FSAU is the conceptual and analytical
integration of food security and nutrition. FSAU utilizes a wide range
of research methods:
. nutritional anthropometry and dietary assessments
. satellite imagery and geographic information systems
. market analysis
. household surveys
. coping strategies index (CSI)
. crop and livestock production surveys
. focus groups and key informants
. review of secondary data and reports
. participatory research methods
Nutrition
The
conceptual framework drawn on by the FSAU Nutrition project focuses on
the key factors that influence nutritional status. Fragile
socio-economic and political environment, food insecurity, unfavorable
care practices and health environment lead to a cycle of malnutrition
and further inadequate in-take of energy and other nutrients. Poor
nutritional status or malnutrition results from a complex set of
elements and not one simple cause. Access to an adequate diet has to be
combined with better maternal health and child care practices, access
to healthcare and environmental health. The socio-economic and
political environment influence food, care and health.
This
particular framework supports decision makers in understanding the
factors influencing nutritional vulnerability and malnutrition and
therefore addresses both underlying and direct factors that influence
nutrition. Within the FSAU Food Security Analysis System,
nutrition status serves as a vital indicator of the overall wellbeing
of populations and facilitates a very broad analysis of all aspects of
food security. Deterioration in nutritional status can be an early
indicator of impending hardship if interpreted together with disease
and food security patterns based on the livelihood systems of a given
community. Continuous analysis of the nutrition situation combined with
other indicators e.g. food security, can help to identify the stages of
a drought process and the response of the population to events around
them. It also gives indication of the impact of interventions
implemented. Because nutrition information is information about people,
it allows an analysis that facilitates the development of interventions
that have both short and long term influence on population well being.
