Assessing Urban Food Security: Adjusting the FEWS Rural Vulnerability Assessment to Urban Environments

 This paper aims to sensitize FEWS field staff to urban food security issues and to build their capacity to guide, design, and implement urban vulnerability assessments (VAs) and food security monitoring. There is a growing recognition of the need to address urban food security issues and evaluate the appropriateness of FEWS rural-centric food security assessment and famine early warning tools for urban areas. This paper, however, does not attempt to go as far as establishing a FEWS guidance manual or recommending specific preferred assessment tools, sets of standard indicators or a monitoring plan. The material presented here is meant to provoke further thinking and experimentation on the part of FEWS field staff, and, in doing so, lead to the development of a more refined framework and guidelines. The scope is broader than FEWS applications. As such, government agencies, non-government organizations (NGOs), and donors who are working on urban poverty alleviation and food security issues may also find this information useful.