The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a network of 129 Universities in 38 African Countries, are organising a webinar on Measuring Food Insecurity in the SDG Era on 15th September 2021 at 14:00 – 16:00 Central European Time (CET) / 15:00 – 17:00 East African Standard Time (EAT).
Background
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its associated Goals (SDGs) marks a significant change in terms of the way we look at addressing the world’s food security problem. It recognizes that food insecurity is more than just “hunger”. To solve it requires paying attention to different aspects starting from ensuring the adequacy of the food supply but also looking into all people’s ability to access the available food. There is no simple way to measure all aspects of food insecurity, and sophisticated methods are especially needed to obtain timely, reliable and relevant information on people’s ability to access food.
In 2013, FAO launched the “Voices of the Hungry” project, establishing a new globally valid tool called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). The latter provides an approach for measuring the severity of people’s food insecurity condition by looking at their own experiences, allowing to hear the voices of the people who struggle daily to have access to safe and nutritious food.
In 2016, the FIES was endorsed as the basis to compile official SDG indicator 2.1.2 by the UN Statistical Commission. Today, the FIES system comprises a set of survey modules, a global reference scale, and the analytic methodology to produce globally comparable estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity at given levels of severity and to measure household and individual food insecurity in several other relevant contexts, such as for program evaluation and impact assessment.
Objective
The objective of this webinar is to introduce FIES as a tool for measuring food insecurity at different levels and raise awareness among the participants on FAO’s work linked to food security data and the SDGs.
In this webinar, Dr. Carlo Cafiero will introduce the FIES and discuss its potential use to measure the severity of the food insecurity condition of individuals and households worldwide.
Dr. Cafiero will share FIES’ use to compute indicators that can be used at different levels, from monitoring and evaluation of specific programs at local level, to monitor SDG Target 2.1 at national, regional, and global levels.
Target audience
Academic staff and graduate students in institutions of higher learning, policy makers in governments, and development work professionals involved in areas related to measuring food insecurity and food security data.
Draft Programme (in East African Time)
Moderator: Dr. Alice Mutiiti Mweeta
| Time | Activity | Responsible person |
| 15:00 – 15:05 | Welcome Remarks from RUFORUM | Dr. Florence Nakayiwa Mayega |
| 15:05 – 15:15 | Welcome Remarks from FAO | Abe Kaori, |
| 15:15 – 15:35 | Presentation Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) | Dr. Carlo Cafiero, |
| 15:35 – 16:00 | Questions and Answer session on the presentation | Moderator |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | Discussion on broader application of FIES | Moderator |
| 16:30 – 16:35 | Closing remarks from FAO | Justin Chisenga, |
| 16:35 – 16:40 | Official closure of the Webinar from RUFORUM | Dr. Florence Nakayiwa |
Speaker Biography
Dr. Carlo Cafiero is a senior economist and statistician at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, Italy. He received a PhD in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2002, a Doctoral degree in Agricultural Economics and Policy from the University of Naples Federico II, Italy in 1996 and a MS in Agricultural Economics from the University of Arizona in 1995.
Since 2012, he is the Manager of the “Voices of the Hungry” project. He collaborated in the definition of the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) as a globally valid food insecurity measurement system.
He currently leads the Team at FAO in charge of the production of food security and nutrition statistics at global, regional, and country levels disseminated through FAOSTAT. He is also the FAO focal point for the food security indicators used to monitor SDG Target 2.1 at the global level.
Registration Link: https://bit.ly/3gfxIQ4
Zoom ID: 829 9506 4043
Passcode: 440518
Further inquiries
- FAO: Justin Chisenga, Team Leader: Partnerships with Academia and Research Institutions (justin.chisenga@fao.org).
- RUFORUM: Emmanuel Okalany – Technical Specialist – Development and Partnership (e.okalany@ruforum.org).
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