Project · Intermediate
Food security classification and assistance targeting
Computing the Food Consumption Score, Household Hunger Scale and reduced Coping Strategy Index from raw components, then deciding which households a limited cash caseload should reach — and defending the threshold choice that decides it.
Context
- Organisation
- Food security and livelihoods programme across four districts
- Problem
- The caseload for the next cash distribution round is fixed at roughly a fifth of surveyed households, but the share classified as food insecure moves from one percent to seven percent depending only on which Food Consumption Score thresholds are applied. The targeting list, and therefore who eats, changes with a decision nobody had written down.
- Audience
- Food security cluster and the cash working group
- Decision it informs
- Which households enter the cash assistance caseload, and on what stated criteria.
Datasets used
Deliverables
- Analysis notebook
notebooks/composite-indicators.ipynb - Dashboard
dashboard/index.html - Technical documentation
docs/threshold-justification.md - Final report
reports/targeting-recommendation.pdf - Presentation slides
slides/cash-working-group.pdf
Three indicators that disagree on purpose
The Food Consumption Score measures dietary diversity and frequency. The Household Hunger Scale measures whether people went without. The reduced Coping Strategy Index measures what they did to avoid it. They correlate at around -0.45, which is exactly loose enough that using one as a proxy for the others throws away real information.
Each has to be computed from raw components, and each has an exclusion rule that matters more than the arithmetic. A Household Hunger Scale with one unanswered question is not a score of zero; it is not a score at all.
The threshold choice is the analysis
The standard 21/35 Food Consumption Score thresholds and the alternative 28/42 set both appear in published guidance. On this dataset they classify one percent and seven percent of households as poor respectively. Neither is wrong. Not saying which you used, in a document that decides who receives assistance, is.
The technical documentation deliverable exists for that sentence.