Instrumentalities are the approaches and methods used in project design and implementation to improve project effectiveness in meeting specific objectives. Several important instrumentalities used or emerging in IFAD’s field experiences are promising for addressing household food security. Building on these experiences, added or adjusted objectives relevant to specific household food security concerns will enrich the project design and implementation and give new opportunities for monitoring and evaluating project performance.

Some specific instrumentalities are being introduced to ensure the full integration of food and nutrition security objectives in mainstream investment projects.

Selected instrumentalities for project design with an HFS focus

Beneficiary targeting with an HFS focus: Vulnerability mapping

Vulnerability maps are now being worked out to improve targeting of the food-insecure rural poor. IFAD can help governments develop such maps. These maps identify areas and sectors of the population vulnerable to food insecurity and highlight the regions that need to be monitored more closely. They help target food aid more effectively and identify factors to consider in the designing of other interventions for vulnerable areas. Vulnerability maps can help national governments and donors in discussions of allocation of resources across regions and post-project follow-up.

Information needed for creating a vulnerability map already exist for most countries. For example, in countries where national early warning systems already operate (e.g., crop forestry, food balance sheets, nutrition surveillance), information supplied by these systems and other sources help develop vulnerability maps for each region. The types of information needed for developing these maps encompass the risk of a given population to exposure to food supply deficits resulting from drought or some other event (war, market failure) and its ability to cope with the deficit through its own resources and procurement strategies.

Depending upon the degree of vulnerability, targeted interventions to communities could include: development-type interventions that would enhance the long-term sustainability of household security; mitigation-type interventions enabling households to retain their productive assets and existing food entitlements; and relief responses if immediate food aid is warranted. IFAD would focus primarily on the first type and collaborate with other agencies to deal with other responses.

Project formulation: Assessing the household food security situation

A critical need is reliable indicators of household expenditure. Documentation on household expenditure patterns is scarce, and no reliable methodology exists to predict expenditure from incremental income changes. The type of studies that exist are usually based on computerized economic analysis, which does not give the total spectrum of change in dietary terms; on in-depth anthropological studies of small populations with minor transfer value to other situations; or on costly dietary intake studies with high precision on a small sample at the cost of overview and time perspective.

Diagnosis of the situation can be strengthened through rapid food security assessment surveys (RFSAS) carried out during project preparation. These provide a comprehensive socio-cultural, economic and ecological assessment of a given area for planning and project implementation. They are particularly useful for identifying the most food insecure groups in an area, underlying factors creating the insecurity, location-specific indicators for food security monitoring and appropriate interventions for alleviating food deficit problems. RFSASs also provide a qualitative understanding of major nutritional problems, the nature and origin of food supply, forms of procurement and coping strategies to maintain access to food in crisis situations, dietary patterns, intrahousehold resource allocation, and the basic determinants of participation.

Through participatory workshops, community members articulate their perception of household food security issues, voice their views on the causes of and remedies for household food insecurity and consider the consequences of the way they allocate their slender resources. Such workshops should be carried out regularly to monitor and evaluate project activities.

Monitoring and evaluation: Selecting food and nutrition security-related indicators

Indicators for assessing HFS conditions in monitoring and evaluation include process indicators that reflect change in food supply and access, and outcome indicators. Food supply indicators include various measures of agricultural production (e.g., agro-meteorological data), access to natural resources, market prices and regional conflict. Most of the data are collected by line agencies. A powerful indicator of food access is change in a household’s procurement strategies for meeting their HFS needs. These strategies will vary by region, community, social class, ethnic group, household, gender and season. Their use as indicators is location specific.

Outcome indicators, on the other hand, indicate the impact of a project on household access to food. Such indicators would include perceived changes in food access and the length of the hungry season.

Vulnerability to food insecurity is often location specific, hence indicators are needed that measure supply and food entitlement changes at the local level, preferably by decentralized HFS monitoring systems. Choice of indicators, and the design of any system to collect HFS data for monitoring and evaluation, must take account of limited financial, human, institutional and infrastructural capacity. Also, governments will have to strike a balance between the need for data for central decisions on the allocation of resources and the need for information appropriate for decentralized HFS monitoring and interventions.

Responding to changing food security conditions: Contingency plans

Where food security conditions may change as a result of a drought or some unforeseen crisis, contingency plans are being incorporated into project design. Such plans involve predetermined responses that would be implemented when conditions changed as recorded by the project’s monitoring system. A small set of location-specific indicators can detect these changes, especially as regards food supply and procurement strategies.

The responses would help households protect their production capacity and assets and involve ways of enhancing community strategies to cope with the crises. Interventions could include mitigating activities carried out by collaborating agencies. Responsibilities for these activities will need to be worked out beforehand to improve response timing, for example, through district-level participatory workshops.

Enhancing household food security conditions in people’s reality: Participatory planning and implementation

IFAD’s view is that household food security and nutritional improvement cannot be ‘delivered’, as such, but must be promoted among the target populations through local initiatives and external responses. Participation of beneficiaries stands out as the key overall instrument for identifying, selecting and strengthening the elements that enable households to achieve and maintain food security and adequate nutrition conditions. This means active engagement of the target group in a process of reflection on and analysis of its problems, leading to proposals for actions, and also involvement in implementing the action and evaluating its impact.

IFAD’s experience shows that projects designed with the active participation of the beneficiaries respond more accurately to the priority needs of the target group and tend to have a better implementation record. Participation also ensures the continued involvement of the beneficiaries through contributions to project investments and management of systems established under the project, with a greater likelihood that activities will be sustained after the project is completed.

It is particularly important to mobilize traditional decision-making systems at the community level, and to organize women for participation in planning and implementation processes. Participation by the beneficiaries in IFAD’s projects has been achieved through a range of measures. Most important is the promotion and strengthening of grass-root institutions, which figure in practically all IFAD-financed projects. Organized farmer groups, women’s groups, savings and credit groups, farmer cooperatives, and water users’/irrigators’ associations are examples. Creation of group funds and village development funds and resource-generation for communal projects such as grain banks follow from such community mobilization. These initiatives contribute to HFS in many ways, such as by creating buffer mechanisms to help stabilize food supplies for households, improving access to extension and other government services and generating income for women. Periodic community-level workshops in the project areas improve implementation of project actions relating to HFS. Such workshops aim at generating reflection by the communities on their perception of food and nutrition and of the causes and remedies for food insecurity. All aspects of nutrition in the broad sense are being addressed on the basis of community members’ own ideas about priorities within their existing food systems, production practices, social and household organization and income-generating opportunities.

Adoption of a participatory approach for food and nutrition-relevant action will also require sensitization of the project personnel and officials from line ministries and institutions on issues pertaining to food and nutrition so that they take account of people’s views in decision-making processes, and are receptive and responsive to people’s needs and priorities.

Community mobilization and participation is at the heart of the Second Badulla Integrated Rural Development Project in Sri Lanka, as a vehicle also for an extensive ‘nutrition thrust’ of the project, encompassing activities relating to household food security and to health aspects of nutrition. Through the intervening of ‘social mobilizers’, the project attempts to strengthen the capacity of community members not only to procure needed resources, but also to make use of those resources to enhance their food security and other nutritional conditions within their overall livelihoods.

Likewise, in the Andhra Pradesh Tribal Development Project in India a series of community nutrition workshops is being organized with the tribals and project staff. Given the fact that the project was designed with HFS as an overall integrating concept, the Andhra Pradesh exercise emerges as one of the most promising illustrations of a successful integration between agricultural investment activities and nutrition security. Together with the Badulla project, it will set an example for similar activities elsewhere.

Capacity-building for technical project backstopping

Promoting household food security as a prerequisite for individual nutrition security requires technical understanding of how to translate HFS concepts in a specific local context and how to use the general framework to guide diagnosis, design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation. The availability of adequate technical expertise is essential for guiding project personnel and beneficiaries in identifying HFS-related opportunities and constraints, and to translate these into activities in investment projects.

Recognizing the limitations in many countries of the relevant expertise, the Fund is experimenting with capacity-building or capacity-strengthening of local technical resource groups or institutions to assist and backstop projects in the promotion of household food security/nutrition improvement. In Kenya, university scholars, in collaboration with the Central Bureau of Statistics, are assisting project management and supporting district staff in establishing the format and indicators for baseline surveys, to be undertaken by this staff in the course of their normal activities. Baseline surveys and monitoring become tools for learning; both parties expand their insights and experiences in the process. In Sri Lanka, an interdisciplinary university group, through modest support by the Fund, has completed a period of self-managed capacity-building (by objectives decided in collaboration between the group and IFAD) with a view towards later technical backstopping of IFAD-supported investment projects in the country.

Collaboration with other agencies for nutrition security

IFAD is an institution that funds investment projects primarily within the agricultural/rural development sector. It is important for the Fund to identify itself with activities that can complement and refine its comparative advantages vis-à-vis those of other agencies. The framework of household food security/nutrition security will enable the Fund and its collaborating partners in Member Countries to delineate these comparative advantages more clearly.

Building on this framework, and with experiences from specific inter-agency undertakings such as the projects supported under the Belgian Survival Fund, IFAD has taken the initiative to explore more systematically how it can most effectively join forces with other agencies effectively to assist the target group in their strive towards nutrition security. Discussions are being held, especially with UNICEF and WFP, about how IFAD and these agencies can provide mutually reinforcing support to the same areas and target groups.

For example, in 1992 the Fund organized, jointly with the UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia, a subregional operational workshop examining the trends in changing food systems in the subregion and the implications for selected IFAD investment projects. One purpose was to consider how UNICEF and IFAD could complement each other to strengthen the capacity of beneficiaries to benefit from more integrated development support from both agencies. Discussions will continue in 1993 with a view towards agreeing on a framework with which the two agencies can define their comparative and mutually supportive advantages in promoting food security and nutritional well-being.

Furthermore, in 1992, together with FAO and the Government of Zambia, the Fund sponsored a provincial-level planning workshop to identify and promote the use of traditional foods in promoting household food security. The workshop has provided valuable insight into certain critical elements of the household food security approach, which has further demonstrated its value in the field as a step towards nutrition security.

Experience over many years has demonstrated the advantages of but also the difficulties in applying an integrated approach to combining activities aimed at enhancing productivity and incomes of the target population, with measures directed towards improving their health and nutritional status. Such an approach has already posed numerous problems for sub-Saharan African countries, particularly as regards the need to coordinate the work of various ministries and ensure the timely attention by each of them to sectoral priorities established within the framework of integrated programmes.

Fund Projects in Africa especially underscore these concerns. The BSF Joint Programme has striven to find solutions to the difficulties inherent in integrated rural development programmes and has chosen various organizational approaches as alternatives to the highly centralized structures normally used for the management of such programmes.

IFAD is committed to building further on these and other relevant experiences to enhance solutions to such problems. Combined with new and promising analytical and operational tools for bringing together conceptual and practical innovations, joint interagency activities can help greatly improve nutritional conditions through integrated investment and social projects and programmes. The Fund hopes that its current efforts towards this end will be of value to many national agencies in their own endeavours to promote food and nutrition security through integrated approaches.