Using the household hunger scale to improve analysis and classification of severe food insecurity in famine-risk conditions: Evidence from three countries

Abstract

The currently accepted means of categorizing household food insecurity and identifying famine or famine risk is through Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis. IPC guidelines set criteria for the measurement and determination of famine, but recent analyses in famine-risk countries have faced several challenges. Commonly used indicators capture different aspects of food security and often produce very divergent estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity. This led to the usage of the Household Hunger Scale (HHS) as the presumed “anchor” indicator for IPC acute food insecurity analysis, with all other indicators of food consumption calibrated to the HHS. But because there was no gold standard, only an “anchor,” this presumption had never been tested. Further, given that HHS was the only indicator that could specify the difference between the two most severe categories of IPC Phase Classification (Phase 4 “Emergency” and Phase 5 “Famine”), analysis of food insecurity at the extreme end of the IPC scale relies heavily on HHS, rather than the standard panoply of indicators used for acute food insecurity analysis at lesser levels of severity. This study sought to test how well HHS differentiates between IPC Phase 4 and Phase 5 and to investigate the validity of the usage of HHS as the “anchor” indicator across the spectrum of IPC analysis. Data was collected in seven different severely food-insecure areas of South Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia. The findings show that, overall, the HHS performs reasonably well as an “anchor indicator” across the IPC scale and is able to differentiate the majority of cases in Phases 4 and 5 but tends to over-classify (over-estimate the severity of food insecurity at the household level)—especially at the lower end of the IPC scale. At the high end of the scale, these results indicate that HHS is good at flagging highly food-insecure households but may require additional information to rigorously differentiate households in Phase 4 from those in Phase 5. The study identified ways to improve classification by HHS by some simple additional questions or observations to differentiate between Phase 4 and Phase 5. In an era of extreme scarcity of humanitarian funding, this has substantial implications for resource allocation and humanitarian prioritization.