The Challenge of Choosing among Food Security Indicators
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines food security as a condition in which all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and supports an active and healthy life.
Food security is commonly understood through four pillars: availability, access, utilization, and stability.
Evaluators can draw on a wide range of indicators and assessment approaches to examine these dimensions. These include the Food Consumption Score, the Household Dietary Diversity Score, the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W), the Consolidated Approach for Reporting Indicators of Food Security (CARI), anthropometric indicators, the “knowledge, attitudes and practices” approach (KAP), the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, and the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) framework.
The availability of so many tools can, however, encourage a “catalogue” effect in which evaluators select familiar or widely used indicators without first examining the intervention’s objectives, activities, and theory of change. This can create a mismatch between the outcomes a project is expected to influence and the changes the evaluation actually measures.
When Standard Indicators Are Poorly Matched to a Project
Standardized indicators can support consistency and comparability, but they are not automatically appropriate for every intervention. Many development projects identify food security as an intended outcome in their theories of change. However, project documents do not always specify which pillars of food security the intervention is expected to influence or which indicators should be used at the different steps of monitoring and evaluation.
When this information is missing, evaluators and project teams may default to familiar or widely used indicators. As a result, these choices may not adequately reflect the nature of the implemented activities or the pathways through which they are expected to influence food-security outcomes. Indicator selection should begin by identifying whether the project is expected to influence:
- Availability: the supply of sufficient quantities of food through production, stocks and trade;
- Access: people’s physical, social, and economic ability to obtain food, including through adequate income, infrastructure, and functioning markets;
- Utilization: people’s ability to consume and benefit from a nutritionally adequate diet, supported by appropriate food preparation and care practices, safe water, sanitation, and health care
- Stability: have the ability to maintain availability, access, and utilization over time despite natural disasters, economic crises, conflict, climate variability, or other shocks.
Mistakes and misalignment may arise when indicator selection receives insufficient attention during project design or evaluation scoping. Time constraints, reporting requirements, limited data availability, and reliance on familiar tools may all contribute. And as a result, attempting to measure every dimension of food security with the same standard set of tools can therefore produce incomplete or misleading findings.
Consider a project that seeks to increase food availability by raising food crop yields and improve economic access to food by increasing income from cash crops or reducing the cost of food for participating households. In this context, anthropometric data and knowledge, attitudes and practices surveys would not, on their own, directly measure changes in food availability or economic access. Indeed, these tools may be more relevant to nutrition- and utilization-related pathways, but their suitability still depends on the project’s objectives and theory of change.
Similarly, a nutrition education project may require measures of nutrition-related knowledge, dietary practices, food consumption, or dietary diversity, depending on its intended pathway of change. A project designed to improve access to safe water should use direct measures of water access, quality, use, and related health or nutrition outcomes. In either case, agricultural production volumes would provide little evidence of whether the intervention achieved its primary objectives.
The Cost of Error: The Consequences of Poor Indicator Selection
A poorly matched indicator can create the appearance of project failure even when the intervention has achieved important results. In the end, this can produce what might be described as a “false failure”: an evaluation conclusion that does not reflect the changes the project was designed to achieve. When indicators are aligned with the project’s theory of change and intended outcomes, the evaluation is better able to detect and interpret the changes the intervention could reasonably have produced.
Consider a project designed to improve children’s diets and nutritional status. If its performance is assessed primarily using regional cereal-availability data, the evaluation may fail to capture changes among participating children and households. Regional food availability may provide useful contextual information, but it cannot substitute for indicators that directly reflect the project’s intended nutrition-related outcomes. This type of error can undermine the credibility of the evaluation, distort accountability of stakeholders, and weaken evidence-based decision-making and advocacy efforts.
Selecting Appropriate Indicators for Food Security Evaluation
A good indicator is not only valid or standardized: it must also be aligned with the project’s theory of change and the outcomes the evaluation is intended to assess.
In food security projects and programs, indicator selection should be closely guided by the project’s intended outcomes and theory of change, ensuring that the indicators reflect the changes the intervention is expected to achieve.
Indicator selection should begin at the very start of the design phase of development projects, when expected outcomes and the various pathways of change in food security are being defined. Identifying appropriate indicators early helps ensure that evaluations measure the outcomes a project is realistically expected to influence.