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A rapid food security assessment was carried out in Eastern Shewa and Western Hararghe to determine what CARE food-assisted projects have been undertaken, and what impact they have had on the participants. To determine whether the projects were properly designed, a rapid assessment of the household food security situation in each project area was carried out. Peasant Associations were selected on the basis of accessibility, main economic activity, distance from main roads, and history of food assistance. Two villages in which CARE assistance was not provided were surveyed in order to compare project areas with nonproject areas. Information sources included a document review, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. Other interviews were conducted with government agencies, and collaborating institutions such as United Nations organizations and other NGOs.

Save the Children Fund is currently involved in the development of an operational method for mapping risk of and vulnerability to food insecurity. This report is the result of field work to collect information on food security and the household food economy in the Mopti region of Mali. This will be used to build up a regional case study applying risk mapping methodology to this region. The methodology involved the collection of information from key informants on sources of food and income, expenditure on food, value of savings and food stocks for households of different degrees of poverty. Information derived from informants and secondary sources was also collected on migration, use of wild foods, and prices in cereal and livestock markets. The paper highlights some of the practical difficulties of finding suitable key informants and considers whether the information they provide is suitable for the risk mapping model. It asserts the need for consistent and skilled interviewing, with considerable advance knowledge of an area, and a capacity to discern biases of respondents.

This paper argues in favour of moving beyond simple preference ranking in P/RRA as conventional methods produce limited data which is often misinterpreted. While ranking enables participants to define their own criteria for discriminating between items, it does not give an overall preference order because different items may have different weightings, so simple adding up would give misleading results. Asking participants to list items subjectively from best to worst overcomes this but still leaves the difficulty of interpreting the gap between ranks. Another alternative is to ask participants to give points to all the items being considered, so that simply adding up the scores allows different items to be compared. A number of ways to improve scoring are presented and illustrated using examples taken from an assessment of a food-for-work programme in Merti-Jeju district, Ethiopia. The study was carried out with women in villages to investigate food preferences, and help choose appropriate commodities for the programme. Techniques include qualified preference which compares one item to another and 'shopping' which simulates choices between many items with different market values. It is considered that these methods give better quantitative information and provide a useful way to explore real-world preferences in different circumstances.

This paper examines the application of Rapid Rural Appraisal techniques to assess the causes, dimensions and characteristics of food insecurity. A procedure referred to as a Rapid Food Security Assessment (RFSA) was carried out during November 1989 in nine communities in North Sudan using a methodology based on the 'Sondeo' approach to RRA. Interviews were carried out with representative households in the various communities using a checklist as the basis for an unstructured conversation. Although the surveys did not use wealth ranking, an effort was made to understand social stratification by asking villagers to estimate what proportion of different types of households made up the villages. More conventional data from markets was also used. The RFSA confirmed that in years with poor rainfall, the landless are doubly affected as wages fall and food prices rise. This has led to recommendations about income support through public works and grain price stabilisation.

The semi-structured interview is a vital tool in rapid rural appraisal, and one for which a number of guidelines have been drawn up. It is an important way of furthering our understanding of the lives of rural people, but it needs to be understood by its practitioners. It is argued that it can contain an inherent bias which often conflicts with the understanding rural people have of the nature of knowledge and information, and therefore the meaning of questions and answers. In a Sudanese example, though interviews with key informants indicated that relief seed had been fairly distributed, further interviews with other members of the community showed that seed had not been distributed equitably to all groups throughout the area. Other examples of interviews in Somalia and Ethiopia are presented and the article concludes that mis-hearing can be corrected by further probing, verification and interpretation.

This paper addresses the issue of using rapid socio- anthropological techniques to understand coping strategies, based on work conducted by SCF(UK) during 1992 in Darfur, Sudan. It begins with a general background to Darfur and definitions of the terms used, and then looks specifically at the Coping Strategies Research Project (CSRP) in Darfur. SCF(UK) hoped that this project would identify the range of coping strategies used, in order to improve their relief operation planning as well as longer term development projects. A number of rapid data collection techniques are used, including semi-structured interviews, use of key informants and group discussions. Data from these were used to construct historical profiles, seasonal calendars, daily routine diagrams, and preference and wealth ranking. Finally problems, constraints, weaknesses and strengths are put forward, with lessons learnt and suggestions for improvement.

The Ogaden Needs Assessment Study was undertaken as a joint exercise between SCF(UK) and the Pastoral Surveillance Team of the RRC Early Warning and Planning Services. The trigger for the study was the influx into the Ogaden of thousands of returnees from Somalia and concern about capacity of the region to support the growing population. A rural sample survey was carried out using two helicopters. The objective was to establish the nutritional status of children and also to get data on grain production, consumption, sale and exchange, and the prospects of the food economy. The health data was obtained using standard anthropometric procedures, while socio-economic data was gathered by the use of questionnaires on key informants. The survey showed that the combined effects of the collapse of the livestock/grain trade and the continuing burden of the returnee population could result in a food crisis during the following dry season.