Household Vulnerability Index (HVI) World Vision in cooperation with FANRPAN

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Household Vulnerability Index (HVI)World Vision
in cooperation with FANRPAN
Presented by Marko Ngwenya (WVS National
Director) on behalf of Food Programming and
Management Group (FPMG) - WV

• FANRPAN, Stakeholders Regional Policy Dialogue
  Annual General Meeting
• VIP Hotel, Maputo
• 31 August 4 September 2009

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Presentation Outline

• Background
• The Household Vulnerability Index (HVI) tool
• Pilot Country Updates
• Interested Stakeholders
• Opportunities Benefits
• The future

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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-assessmen
  t 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

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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