USAID General Publications Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning (MAHFP) for Measurement of Household Food Access: Indicator Guide (Version 4)

All Title II programs have improvements in food security as their core objective. As defined by USAID, food security has three components - availability, access and utilization.1 Title II programs focus on the access and utilization components. Utilization, in the context of food security, refers to the individual’s biological capacity to make use of food for a productive life. Consensus on the measurement of the utilization component has centered on various measures of nutritional status (anthropometric measurement) of children. Household food access is defined as the ability to acquire sufficient quality and quantity of food to meet all household members’ nutritional requirements for productive lives. Given the variety of activities implemented by implementing partners (IPs) to improve household food access and the significant challenges most IPs face in measuring household food access for reporting purposes, there is a need to build consensus on appropriate household food access impact indicators. This guide provides an approach to measuring household food provisioning as a proxy measure of household food access.