Reduced Hunger and Food Insecurity

Result Statement: Reduced number of families experiencing moderate and severe food insecurity The FIES is a metric of severity of food insecurity at the household or individual level that relies on people’s direct yes/no responses to eight brief questions regarding their access to adequate food. It is a statistical measurement scale similar to other widely-accepted statistical scales designed to measure unobservable traits such as aptitude/intelligence, personality, and a broad range of social, psychological and health-related conditions.

The FIES-SM questions refer to the experiences of the individual respondent or of the respondent’s household as a whole. The questions focus on self-reported food-related behaviors and experiences associated with increasing difficulties in accessing food due to resource constraints.

During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources:

1. You were worried you would not have enough food to eat?
2. You were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food?
3. You ate only a few kinds of foods?
4. You had to skip a meal?
5. You ate less than you thought you should?
6. Your household ran out of food?
7. You were hungry but did not eat?
8. You went without eating for a whole day?

Gender of Head of household, age, disability, community type

The FIES survey module can be applied using different reference periods (30 days or 12 months). For SDG monitoring, a 12 month reference period is recommended because it controls for possible seasonal changes in food security; for this reason, it improves comparability of results across countries or across national regions with different environmental and climatic zones. If the survey is conducted continuously throughout and is time stratified, as is the case with some national Living Standards Monitoring Surveys, a 30-day reference can be used. Average prevalence rates of food insecurity during the year can be still be calculated for SDG monitoring purposes. When the FIES is being applied to identify risk factors and consequences of food insecurity rather than for population monitoring, a 30-day reference period is preferred. In this case, ideally surveys are time stratified and data collection is spread over the year in order to capture seasonality. The shorter reference period might be more appropriate when food insecurity is being studied in relation to data collected in the same survey on food consumption during the previous day, week or month