Attachments
1. Introduction
The Port au Prince case study is part of the Adapting to an Urban World project. The Adapting project was developed to address an identified gap in urban assessment tools. The aim of the project is to develop food security and vulnerability assessment guidance and tools specifically designed for use in urban contexts. In order to achieve this objective, the project will examine a number of different urban contexts with food insecure populations.
The first case study/pilot assessment was conducted in Harare, Zimbabwe in November 2014; it included qualitative primary data collection and field-testing of newly developed tools. The second case study focused on Syrian refugees in Amman and Beirut, focusing on methodological and operational issues identified by humanitarian actors. The third was a statistically representative survey led by WFP in three cities (Antananarivo, Tulear, and Tamatave) of Madasgascar. The fourth was a pilot assessment, testing methods and tools, in Mogadishu, Somalia. The Port au Prince pilot assessment is therefore the fifth case study to contribute to the project learning.
The population in Haiti is rapidly urbanizing - in 1990, 29% of the population lived in urban areas. In 2014, that figure had risen to 57%, and it is projected to reach 76% by 2050. This is one of the highest rates of change in the world.1
The catastrophic earthquake in 2010 killed an estimated 220,000 people; these enormous losses were largely due to poor housing construction, compounded by high population density. Since the earthquake, Haiti has received almost $6 billion in official aid.2 The large majority of this money has been funnelled to the thousands of NGOs which are operational in Haiti.
Significant assistance and recovery programming is ongoing within Haiti, with much work focused in Port au Prince. To better understand assistance needs and seasonal fluctuations, the Coordination Nationale de la Securité Alimentaire and the World Food Programme will design an urban food security monitoring system (observatoire urbain) in Port au Prince. However, with limited up-to-date geographic and census data, and many people still displaced (IOM currently estimates almost 65,000 people still displaced in Haiti3), assessments and monitoring are particularly challenging. The Adapting to an Urban World project seeks to improve understanding of urban food security and economic vulnerability. For these reasons, the project selected Port au Prince for a pilot food security assessment; the results are intended to support selection of indicators for the observatoire urbain, contribute lessons learned to the operational aspects of urban assessments in Haiti, and will contribute to improving urban assessment methodology globally.
The specific objectives of the Port au Prince case study are as follows:
- Improve understanding of the factors defining vulnerability (at geographic and household level) within Port au Prince
- Test new methods of sampling in a context with limited census date
- Analyze standard food security indicators (food consumption, income, expenditure, coping, etc) to see if they accurately depict the condition of households in Port au Prince
- Analyze urban livelihoods
- Identify food security indicators that could potentially contribute to an urban monitoring system in Haiti
- Contribute to overall Adapting to an Urban World project learning