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Humanitarian Practice Network, Network Paper Number 47
Missing the point: an analysis of food security interventions in the Great lakes
Commissioned and published by the Humanitarian Practice Network at ODI
Simon Levine and Claire Chastre with Salomй Ntububa, Jane MacAskill, Sonya LeJeune, Yuvй Guluma, James Acidri and Andrew Kirkwood
July 2004
Posted with permission of Greg Ramm, Save the Children (UK), Pretoria office.
SARPN also acknowledges the Humanitarian Practice Network at the ODI: www.odihpn.org
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Introduction
The Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa is naturally
blessed: two rainy seasons a year give it great agricultural
potential, lakes and rivers provide abundant fish and timber
and minerals abound. Yet in the last decade it has been the
scene of probably more human suffering than any other part
of the world. The aid community has reacted to the many
crises in the region with a multitude of interventions. This
paper is about those interventions, which were aimed
explicitly to improve the food security of people affected by
crises: the study did not examine other interventions that
may have had food security impacts, for instance health care.
The study
The study attempts to answer the following questions
about food security interventions in the Great Lakes:
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What responses have agencies and institutions in the
Great Lakes used to promote food security?
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How do these interventions compare with the constraints
to food security that can be or have been identified?
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Are there any constraints which agencies have not
addressed, and if so, why?
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Are there any institutional or structural factors which
affect how organisations have responded to food
insecurity, and what impact have these had on the
quality of response?
The paper is based on the findings of seven case studies
conducted in three countries (Uganda, Burundi and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)) under the direction
and support of Save the Children UK. (Some of the results
are also relevant to other places, for instance southern Africa
or the Horn.) In each case, the study sought to analyse in
detail the actual livelihood situation of people affected by
specific crises, and the constraints they faced in their food
security. An analysis was then done of the food security
interventions that were implemented, to see how and why
they were carried out, how well they were targeted, and
what impact the interventions had on food security. Factors
that affected responses were inferred from a variety of
sources: interviews with key informants from agencies and
donors; the documentation of agencies active on the
ground; and the experiences of the researchers themselves
in a range of organisations in the region over several years.
The seven case studies were:
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in Burundi, the responses in 2000 to 2001 to the
lengthy drought in Kirundo Province, and to the forced
displacement of the civilian population of Bujumbura
Rural Province from 1999 to 2001;
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in DRC, two urban crises – the volcanic eruption in
Goma in January 2002 and the ethnic war in Bunia town
in 2003 – and interventions as displaced people
returned home to the Masisi plateau in 1999–2003; and
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in Uganda, the displacement in Kasese District from
1996 to 2000 caused by armed conflict, and the
situation in Gulu District in 2001 to 2003, where war
with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has led to the
displacement of almost the entire rural population.
The case studies were chosen with three criteria in mind:
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they should represent as well as possible the full range
of crisis situations in the Great Lakes (from natural
disasters to conflict, from displacement to recovery,
and in urban and rural settings);
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good information should already be available on
people’s livelihoods and food security constraints, in
order to minimise the amount of field work needed for
the study; and
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they should be reasonably representative of the range
of interventions used in the Great Lakes region.
Work began by reviewing the literature on livelihoods and
food security. Researchers visited the crisis sites and
interviewed – where available – staff of institutions working
in food security at the time of the crisis, including UN
agencies, NGOs and donors, as well as central and local
government or the de facto authority. Project documents,
including assessments, proposals and impact studies, were
also often shared with the researchers. The study was not
designed to evaluate any particular intervention, and so
there was no field research of projects. All the information
about the interventions was obtained from the implementing
institution itself, or occasionally from existing literature. For
the Uganda case studies, existing food security information
was not detailed enough, so a food security assessment was
carried out using the ‘household economy’ approach.1
Otherwise, the methodology was the same.
Structure of the report
This report is structured as follows:
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Chapter 2 presents the seven case studies. Each case
identifies the constraints to food security, and
discusses the main responses.
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Chapter 3 looks at the link between the responses and
the constraints, analysing the ‘criteria of appropriateness’
for each intervention to see to what extent these
criteria were met. It also explores the constraints to food
security that were not addressed by agencies, and
discusses evidence of the impact of the interventions.
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Chapter 4 examines how the aid effort was managed,
and explores some of the causes of weaknesses in the
humanitarian response.
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Chapter 5 summarises the main conclusions and
presents recommendations.
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