158 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance
At the household level, two measures of multidimensional poverty have been estimated for most countries: the United Nations Development Programme and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (Global MPI) and the World Bank’s multidimensional poverty headcount rate.14 The key difference between them is that the Global MPI includes only nonmonetary dimensions, while the World Bank measure includes both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions. Food security is another nonmonetary measure of welfare that is commonly used. Food security measures whether people can buy food (is it available and affordable?) and benefit nutritionally from eating it (does it contain the right nutrients, can they prepare it properly, and can they metabolize it?). Food security can be defined and measured in different ways and is commonly used by the United Nations and other humanitarian actors to target aid. It is often correlated with monetary poverty but can differ for important reasons (see box 3.2).
Box 3.2
Food Security and Money-Metric Welfare Food (in)security is a metric of welfare used to prioritize assistance during times of stability and times of shock. Given its widespread use, it is useful to understand its relationship to money-metric measures. Food security covers several dimensions: (1) availability (is food available in a certain location?), (2) access (can a household access adequate food, given prices, incomes, and its access to formal and informal social assistance?), and (3) utilization (can individuals and households make good use of the food to which they have access?). These dimensions matter in a cumulative manner: if food is not available in an area, a household or individual will not have an adequate diet. But even when food is available, households must be able to afford to buy sufficient food. Even then, do they choose a nutritious diet or not? Do they prepare it properly to deliver its full nutritional value? Are they healthy enough to metabolize and absorb the nutrients? See Barrett (2010) for further discussion. How do food security measures relate to monetary poverty measures? At extreme levels of poverty, monetary poverty and food insecurity are likely to be highly correlated, as affording a minimum number of calories is the first objective households and individuals will satisfy. continued next page
