Study of Food Assistance effectiveness and efficiency

Background and objectives

In recent years, food insecurity has reached alarming levels, with over 281 million people worldwide experiencing acute food insecurity—double the number reported in 2019. At the same time, global resources allocated to humanitarian food assistance have either stagnated or declined, exacerbating the funding gap. This situation underscores the urgent need for more effective and efficient food assistance interventions. With limited resources available, it has become crucial to maximise the impact of every intervention and ensure an optimal use of scarce resources.

In this context, DG ECHO is keen to better understand the factors that influence the effectiveness and efficiency of its food assistance programs. Effectiveness is a complex issue to assess, given the diverse and often incomparable nature of humanitarian crises, where multiple variables come into play. Nevertheless, some insight may be drawn by examining some typical humanitarian scenarios that can be reasonably extrapolated to other crises.

Thus, the overall objective of this assignment is to analyse and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of DG ECHO’s humanitarian food and livelihoods (HFLA) interventions by leveraging evidence from field interventions (based on 5-6 case studies that are representative of typical humanitarian contexts).

• assessing the relative effectiveness of various humanitarian interventions by comparing their food security outcomes in situations with similar contextual factors;
• analysing the effectiveness of interventions over time, particularly before and after the introduction of certain indicators in planning and implementation.
• identify the key factors influencing the effectiveness of HFLA interventions as well as MPCA (multi-purpose cash assistance, which refers to humanitarian cash transfers designed to meet multiple needs).

1. Until end 2024.