4. DESARROLLO PROPUESTA
4.1.3 Requerimientos y características de la solución
Awareness raising and capacity building
● Four audio slideshows presenting community voices
● Workshops: Tanzania (2x); Bangladesh; Malawi, Zambia, Nepal
● One IDS seminar, February 2014 (www.ids.ac.uk/events/the-hunger-and-nutrition- commitment-index-an-introduction#eventstraming)
● Training courses: IDS Nutrition Summer Training Course (July 2013); WFP Nutrition Training Course (June 2013)
● Presentations: Irish Aid (November 2013); Child Investment Fund Foundation (April 2014); Lancet Series on Nutrition (June 2013); McGill University, Global Conference on Food Security, October 2013 (http://bcooltv.mcgill.ca/Viewer2/?rid=1070099d-8eb6- 4558-a76d-9c99330b8a52)
Policy influencing
● Policy workshop Tanzania with 12 MPs and 2 deputy-ministers (November 2013) ● Roundtable event UK-Tanzanian MPs (with RESULTS UK, November 2013) Programmatic
use and academia
HANCI has been reported as having been used by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health to support decisions on country and partner selection. The DFID-funded Operations Research and Impact
Evaluation (ORIE) project in Northern Nigeria uses HANCI data for its M&E plan for the DFID. PATH uses HANCI as part of its criteria for selecting applications to award funds to CSOs through the DFID Nutrition Embedded Evaluation Programme (NEEP). References are also made to HANCI in, among others: Lancet Series 2013; World Economic and Social Survey report (www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/index.shtml); IFPRI 2013 Global Food Policy Report
Radio, TV, newspapers coverage
● Tanzania policy workshop: covered in ten Tanzanian TV broadcasts and broadsheet articles
● TV interviews D. te Lintelo on Al-Jazeera, June 2013
(www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2013/04/201341375931646699.htm) and on 16 October, World Food Day
● News items and interviews with D. te Lintelo aired on Radio: BBC World Service, BBC National and Regional; Radio Moscow
(http://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/25298789/221967970/) and the Netherlands (www.rnw.nl/africa/article/poverty-no-bar-fighting-deadly-undernutrition)
● Reports in online media and news print have covered the Index internationally e.g. Reuters (www.trust.org/alertnet/news/emerging-economies-lag-in-commitment-to- tackle-hunger-index), and in countries including:
o Guatemala (www.dca.gob.gt/index.php/template-features/item/16505- reconocen-lucha-contra-el-hambre.html) o Kenya (www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-116616/kenya-among-countries-not- committed-fighting-hunger-says-report, Tanzania), o Tanzania (http://thecitizen.co.tz/news/4-national-news/30488-new-index- shows-tanzania-most-devoted-to-war-on-famine-in-east-africa) o UK (www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/apr/11/guinea-bissau- countries-commitment-hunger) o Finland (www.kepa.fi/uutiset/10032) o Netherlands (www.nieuwsbank.nl/inp/2013/06/05/Y087.htm)
Blogs IDS blogs: IDS Povertics blog (June, October 2013); Development Horizons blog by Lawrence Haddad (June, October, November 2013). Externally, IDS authored blogs featured on AllAfrica (http://allafrica.com/stories/201304140158.html and
http://allafrica.com/stories/201304121076.html, April 2013) and on ReliefWeb (April 2013); ChildWatch International Research Network (May 2013)
Several development bloggers also picked up on HANCI, including:
● Roger Thurlow, IFPRI (http://outrageandinspire.org/2014/01/28/gimme-nutrition/). ● Scott Bleggi, Bread for the World, May 2013 (http://notes.bread.org/2013/05/whos-
walking-the-walk-country-commitments-to-fighting-malnutrition.html)
● Duncan Green, Oxfam, http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/does-hunger-make-you-want-to-cry- if-so-get-your-hanci-out/ April 2013 and also featured on World Bank’s ‘People, spaces, deliberation’ blog, http://blogs.worldbank.org/team/duncan-green
● Sight and life (July 2013) www.sightandlife.org/news/news-details/article/The-Hunger- And-Nutrition-Commitment-Index-HANCI-2012.html
● OneWorld South Asia (April 2013) http://southasia.oneworld.net/resources/ids- launches-hunger-and-nutrition-commitment-index-hanci - .U4TQBSgvTwB
7 Conclusions
The HANCI 2013 is the second issue of the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index for developing countries. It measures government commitment to reducing hunger and
improving nutrition because this is something governments can be held accountable for by civil society actors.
We employ two methods for assessing commitment: secondary data for cross-country comparisons, and primary data based on community and ‘expert’ opinion to further assess political commitment within selected countries. The primary data provides a complementary and up-to-date perspective on political commitment to reducing hunger and undernutrition, as it interrogates a set of commitment indicators for which little to no secondary data is available for most countries.
The HANCI 2013 compares 45 countries’ performance over 22 indicators on public spending, policies and programmes and legal frameworks; instruments that governments can employ to enhance access, availability and utilisation of food and nutrition. The HANCI aggregates relative political commitment levels and offers a comparative analysis with the HANCI 2012 findings. While the HANCI cannot aggregate absolute levels of commitment across
indicators, changes in performance on individual indicators allow an opportunity to assess country commitment over time.
Main findings for the HANCI 2013 include:
● Guatemala, followed by Peru and Malawi, tops the list of 45 countries in terms
of relative political commitment to addressing hunger and undernutrition.
● Guinea Bissau, Sudan and Myanmar languish at the bottom of the rankings.
● Guatemala retains the number one position on the HANCI, despite declining
commitment scores.
● Competition for the HANCI’s top spot is heating up.
● At the bottom regions of the index, some countries are witnessing significant
improvement in committed action on hunger and nutrition.
● Worryingly, several countries that are already at the bottom of the HANCI
ranking, including Guinea Bissau, the Yemen and Sudan, are demonstrating a decline in relative commitment. These countries are increasingly getting left behind.
When countries are grouped by commitment levels and cross-tabulated against critical context variables such as hunger and undernutrition levels and trends, wealth and
governance effectiveness, findings for the HANCI 2013 were strikingly similar to those for the HANCI 2012.
● Significantly, within areas of high and growing hunger and undernutrition
prevalence, some countries are clearly showing much greater political commitment to addressing these problems than others.
● Among those countries with high stunting levels and with ‘serious’ or
‘alarming’ status on the Global Hunger Index, there is high variation in relative commitment levels.
● Worryingly, in those countries that have seen stunting increase over the last
two decades, current levels of political commitment are low to very low. Many countries in this position are currently or have recently been afflicted by conflict (Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Burundi, Yemen, Afghanistan and Sudan).
● The countries showing relatively highest commitment are found in diverse wealth groups. Low wealth is not necessarily an impediment for taking committed action on hunger and undernutrition.
● Countries in the highest wealth group (>$3,500 per year per capita) are more
likely to undertake committed action than those that are less well off. Some middle-income countries that were shown to lag in commitment in the HANCI 2012 are now reported as demonstrating improved efforts at addressing hunger and undernutrition.
● Economic growth has not necessarily led to a commitment from governments
to tackle hunger and undernutrition.
● The relative commitment to hunger reduction does not predict the relative
commitment to nutrition. This is shown by both secondary and primary research findings from expert perception surveys in Bangladesh, India, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania and Zambia. The expert surveys thus show that the general public, the media and civil society organisations as well as senior political party leadership are generally less supportive of government action on nutrition than on hunger. One major challenge therefore is to not just change government commitment, but to enhance commitment towards nutrition within non-state sections of society.