TYPES OF SAF ANALYSIS

The Standard Analytical Framework (SAF) addresses three principal types of food security and vulnerability analyses.

Food security and vulnerability analyses can be grouped into three broad categories: 'baseline', monitoring and emergency analyses. The Standard Analytical Framework will provide guidance on each.

"BASELINE" ANALYSES

'Baseline' analyses describes food security or vulnerability conditions for a selected group of people or geographic area over a selected period of time.

The Comprehensive Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) is a 'baseline' food security and vulnerability analysis being developed by the VAM Unit. It identifies and measures chronic food security problems that can be best addressed with development activities.

Baseline analyses also provide a pool of information on food security and vulnerability conditions that provides key inputs into periodic monitoring and emergency assessments, as well as disaster mitigation and contingency planning activities.

MONITORING

Vulnerability Monitoring: is an analytic activity that identifies significant changes in the status of food insecurity and vulnerability conditions for any place or group of people.

It provides a basis for evaluating short-term threats to food security, and for determining when specific responses to slow-onset or longer-term vulnerabilities (HIV/AIDS, population pressure etc.) might be required in the form of development activities, contingency and disaster mitigation planning.

Early Warning is the best-known periodic monitoring activity. It focuses on tracking the status of regularly-occuring hazards to food security such as drought, flooding, El Niño, price volatility, etc.

Where there is no organised early warning capability in a country or region, WFP and its partners may have to help undertake it.

Emergency Monitoring: in areas where an emergency has already broken and a response is underway, emergency monitoring can be regularly carried out in order to determine the dimension and direction of changes in food security status.

This assessment can identify key turning points that may signal the need for raising or lowering levels of aid or for switching WFP's activities from relief to recovery.

EMERGENCY VULNERABILITY ANALYSIS

In food crises, the first analysis usually carried out is an Emergency Needs Assessment (ENA).

It rapidly verifies:

• whether there is a problem
  
  
• the scope of the emergency (how many people are affected, why, where)
  
  
• the size of response needed (what food gap the hungry are facing, how they can be reached).

The ENA allows WFP to make a fast response to an emergency, quickly identifying the resources required. But it is undertaken in a short timeframe, and this often gives little more than a 'broad-brush' estimate of the problem.

Between the time the ENA is completed, and the moment food is physically available to deliver to the hungry, there is usually time for a so-called Emergency Vulnerability Analysis.

An Emergency Vulnerability Analysis represents a more systematic and thorough assessment of the emergency conditions, requiring three to four weeks to carry out.

It uses existing secondary data to assess the severity and scope of the emergency as well as gathering new information from primary data collection and analysis. The latter data is used to determine impacts and options to address the emergency.