Madagascar Special Report, December 2021

Androy SemiSemi-arid Cassava, Maize, Sweet Potato, and Livestock Livelihood Zone (MG24) Hot Spot Profile

Executive Summary

• Hot spot profiles focus on livelihood zones that frequently need humanitarian food assistance and are designed to provide analysts with a better understanding of the parameters that trigger acute levels of food insecurity in geographies of concern and to help analysts interpret the emergence of a similar crisis in the future.

• The Household Economy Analysis (HEA) framework is used to run scenarios for the profiles. The scenarios examine how a historical hazard event affected poor households’ access to key food and income sources. Any food and income gaps households face due to the historic hazard are quantified, and the indicative IPC phase determined.

• MG24 (Androy Semi-arid Cassava, Maize, Sweet potato Livelihood Zone) was selected as the area of focus because it is frequently classified in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis)1 or worse in FEWS NET reporting and has faced recurring droughts in recent years.

• The MG24 hot spot profile includes three scenarios. The first explores the impacts of the October 2019 – March 2020 drought on food security during the 2020/21 consumption year. The drought resulted in well below-average crop production and above-average prices. The second scenario focuses on the impacts of the same 2019/20 drought on the 2020/21 consumption year and includes the same amount of humanitarian assistance which was present in the reference year (2017/18); the third scenario includes an expansion in the amount of cash assistance.

• In the 2019/2020 drought scenario with no assistance results indicate very poor households have an annual survival deficit of 30 - 40 percent, indicative of Emergency (IPC Phase 4); poor households experience an annual survival deficit of 20 - 30 percent, indicative of Emergency (IPC Phase 4). The largest seasonal deficits occur from September 2020 – March 2021, when very poor households experience seasonal survival deficit of 45 – 55 percent.

• The 2019/2020 drought scenario with assistance levels at the same as the reference years results indicate very poor households face an annual survival deficit of 15 – 25 percent, indicative of Crisis (IPC Phase 3); poor households also face an annual survival deficit indicative of 5 – 15 percent, indicative of Crisis (IPC Phase 3). The third scenario, which includes additional cash assistance beyond baseline levels, also indicates annual deficits indicative of Crisis (IPC Phase 3) among very poor and poor households.

• The severity of food security outcomes for MG24 following the 2019/2020 drought indicated by the hot spot profile is worse than the outcomes published in FEWS NET ‘s October 2020 and February 2021 food security outlook reports. These differences in phase classification can be attributed to the outlook being forward looking, while the hot spot profile benefited from additional data which was not available when the outlook was prepared. Additionally, FEWS NET’s outlook reports leverage a convergence of evidence approach based on multiple IPC indicators, while the hot spot profile only utilizes HEA outcomes.