Household Vulnerability Index (HVI) World Vision in cooperation with FANRPAN FANRPAN, Stakeholders Regional Policy Dialogue & Annual General Meeting VIP Hotel, Maputo 31 August – 4 September 2009 Presented by Marko Ngwenya (WVS National Director) on behalf of Food Programming and Management Group (FPMG) - WV

Presentation Outline  Background  The Household Vulnerability Index (HVI) tool  Pilot Country Updates  Interested Stakeholders  Opportunities & Benefits  The future

Background  World Vision is a Christian, Community based and Child focused organization.  The organization is involved in implementing development, relief and advocacy programmes in nine countries in southern Africa and these programmes are at community level and hence it interfaces with issues at household level.  The data is often not available at local levels and in programme planning there is tendency to use national and regional level statistics for planning purposes. Baseline surveys are based on samples.  The need to quantify the vulnerability levels of households led to the piloting of the HVI in August 2006 in Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe

Background cont….  Identifying vulnerable households has been a challenge and sometimes processes have been biased despite the fact that community input would have been used.  It has been noted that measuring impact when baseline is not well defined is difficult.  Credible data is required in order to increase our confidence level that the programmes we implement are meeting the needs of the vulnerable.

The Tool  HVI represents a composite index able to quantify the vulnerability for a given household  The HVI aims to categorize households according to their degrees of vulnerability in order to ensure improved planning and targeting of interventions  HVI characteristics:  sensitivity to inter-household variations and its ability to pinpoint the capital assets at household level that may require strengthening  HVI assists to objectively separate households according to the level and source of vulnerability,  HVI can inform development programming, and facilitate context-tailored transition from relief programming into development  HVI can assist effective design of appropriate mitigation responses and targeting of households.

Pilot Country Updates  Total Database population of 12, 225 HH across three countries  Lesotho: – Pilot locations: 1 Maphutseng WV Area Development Program – Hired and trained 29 local Enumerators on data collection – Data collected from 2,858 households in Maphutseng ADP, – Data entry to be completed in September 2009  Swaziland: – Pilot locations: 1 Mpolonjeni WV Area Development Program – Hired and trained 30 Enumerators for data collection – Data collection using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) & Geographical Positions (GPS) of all households – Data entry for 3,212 HH in Mpolonjeni ADP completed – Permanent database developed and first draft report produced  Zimbabwe: – Pilot locations: Rushinga WV Area Development Program – Hired & trained 30 enumerators for data collection – Data collected from 6,155 households – Data entry and cleaning ongoing

Interested Stakeholders  Stakeholders who have expressed interest include the following:  Communities,  Government Ministries/ Entities (e.g. Disaster Management Agencies), e.g. Office for Statistics,  Research Institutions,  Donor Agencies (WFP, FAO, EC, etc.),  Vulnerability Assessment Committees,  Country-FANRPAN Nodes, NGO-coordination fora,  Next steps will be to clarify their interests and engage them in a practical manner

Modification needs  Need for refined and concise definition of three basic HVI-categories of vulnerability: – Emergency Level Households (ELHs); – Acute Level Households (ALH) and – Coping Level Households (CLH).  Data collection challenges – Difficult Terrain in Lesotho was rough, some households were inaccessible for enumerators – Seasonal migration – “empty households”  Data Entry Challenges – Limited time to explore the template and logical errors

Opportunities & Benefits  Ready-to-use information for multiple sectors and purposes: Information on beneficiaries in various interventions should be updated regularly to monitor our contribution  Transparency and objectivity for targeting - The database should be placed in rural community centers for accountability and transparency. Selection of beneficiaries on political grounds will be minimized  Increased efficiency & reduced community-assessment fatigue - Once the database is populated and maintained, any required detailed baseline information can be obtained  The process of registering beneficiaries in relief is too long whilst the communities would be starving, so the database will save time for different interventions

The Future  Strong Planning, Monitoring & Early Warning Tool - The database can be used as a planning tool for activities at different administrative levels and used by a variety of stakeholders (CSO, Ministry of Health, etc.)  Context-tailored intervention planning - source of vulnerability can be matched to the type of intervention and the needs in the communities can be well represented in proposals to donors  Publication of first results from Pilot Countries  Need for linkage to Policy influence & Dialogue forum – Donor Acquisition  From Pilot to Roll-out-phase