Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 — a service provided by UN OCHA

World + 15 more

SADC Regional Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis Synthesis Report 2017

Attachments

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

The mandate of the Regional Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis (RVAA) Programme is to “strengthen national and regional vulnerability analysis systems in order to inform policy formulation, development programmes and emergency interventions that lead to a reduction in vulnerability”. The Regional Vulnerability Assessment Committee (RVAC) and the NVAC system is more than a data generation mechanism: its intention is to engage and influence policy uptake and implementation, to ensure VAA efforts will achieve the intended impacts.

Every year, the SADC RVAA Programme organises a Dissemination Forum to share information on the state of food insecurity and vulnerability in the Region. The Forum begins with a meeting of technicians from the RVAC and NVACs to review and debate the findings of the vulnerability assessments and prepares reports for the consideration and approval of Senior Government Officials.

For more than a decade, the NVACs have been conducting vulnerability assessments in the region. The vulnerability assessments mostly utilize livelihood-based approaches to VAA, which among other things assess the interactions between food production, prices, income, and expenditure patterns to determine households’ response to various stressors to livelihoods.

The 2017 RVAA Annual Dissemination Technical Forum took place from 10 - 13 July 2017 at the Capital Empire Hotel in Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa. It was attended by NVACs from all Member States, SADC Secretariat and International Cooperating Partners (ICPs). The Senior Officials meeting of Member States was also held at the same venue from 14 July 2017 and was attended by all the 15 Member States. The meeting endorsed the SADC Regional Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis Synthesis Report 2017.

This report provides an overview of the food security and livelihoods situation in the region for the 2017/18 marketing season/consumption year as discussed at the Dissemination Forum.

Chapter one provides the report introduction, the objectives of the Dissemination Forum, and introduces briefly, the approaches and methods used in regional VAA. Chapter two presents the regional social economic summary. The chapter builds partly on secondary sources for issues such as macro-economic statistics, malnutrition and HIV prevalence, while NVAC data is the basis for information on crop production, cereal prices, and food security trends and livelihood vulnerability. Chapter three presents the main conclusions and recommendations of the Dissemination Forum. Chapter four provides highlights on the situation of individual Member States, while Chapter five provides an overview of on-going work critical methodological innovations in the regional Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis (VAA) work presented at the Annual Dissemination Forum.