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The Costs of Inaction and their Implications on WFP food assistance
Across Eastern Africa, food insecurity as classified under IPC Phase 3+ has increased by 151 percent in just 7 years to 65 million in 2022. To respond to this crisis WFP has scaled up its assistance to food insecure populations from approximately 19 million assisted beneficiaries in 2015 to 40 million in 2022, an increase of 113 percent.
However, the sheer scale and speed in the deterioration of food security has resulted in an increasing gap between needs and the resources available to WFP to intervene and there have been significant funding shortfalls. In addition, the macroeconomic shocks in the region such as high food prices and inflation have also increased WFP’s operational costs putting extra stress on the already-stretched capacity of WFP to respond.
WFP has therefore been forced to modify its responses due to funding gaps in the following ways: 1) It reduced the number of people it could reach and 24.5 million food insecure people were not assisted 2) WFP reduced the duration of assistance 3) WFP implemented ration cuts. This means that for many people reached by WFP the duration or size of their assistance is below their minimum daily requirements. These “inactions” have had repercussions on the food security of people already in need.
This first Cost of Inaction study aims to quantify the impacts of the World Food Programme’s funding shortfalls in the Eastern Africa region in 2021 and 2022. It also looks at the potential impacts on food insecure populations and WFP future operations. This is not to ignore the fact that there are various key humanitarian actors in the region, starting with governments.
The analysis uses Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) data so in this study the food insecure numbers equate to populations classified as IPC Acutely food insecure 3,4 and / or 5.
Lastly this novel study will now act as a baseline for further RAM work on the implications of inaction on food security levels at the household level. This work has already begun in partnership with the University of California, Davis.
KEY FINDINGS
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The Cost of Inaction on WFP’s food assistance in Eastern Africa in 2022 translates into 24.5 M Acutely food insecure (IPC 3, 4 or 5) people NOT receiving any assistance. By December 2022 nearly 40 percent of the IPC acutely food insecure across 10 countries in Eastern Africa received no assistance from WFP.
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The cost to provide a full ration increased by 26 percent between 2021 and 2022, forcing WFP to resort to different strategies (e.g. ration cuts, targeting, prioritization).
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WFP needed to spend 0.81 cents per person per day in 2022 but could only spend 0.52 cents.
This meant that for those people assisted, WFP was able to provide, on average, only 62% of the minimum daily kilocalories needed. The long-term implications of this particularly on women, children and the elderly will be dire. -
If the above gaps persist, there will, over time, be an increase in both the numbers of hungry people as well as an increase in the severity of their hunger, which will see an increasing percentage of the population moving into worse IPC phases. This in turn will necessitate an increase in resources required by WFP and its partners to combat hunger.
This in summary is the cost of inaction on WFP’s operations; in 2021 and 2022 WFP (1) was unable to reach all the people in the Eastern Africa Region that were classified as acutely food insecure (IPC 3+) and (2) provide even the minimum kilocalories needed per day to those people it could assist.