HFA toolbox

This session provides an overview of the different typologies of food assistance responses and their appropriateness to different contexts.

The assistance is provided for the time needed to meet the humanitarian requirements, including support for operations that prepare for, prevent or mitigate disasters, or that facilitate recovery.
The responses suggested may often need to be interchanged or combined according to the context and the needs.

Objectives of HFA

  1. Safeguard the availability of access to and consumption of sufficient, safe and nutritious food for populations affected by ongoing, firmly forecasted, or recent humanitarian crises so as to avoid excessive mortality, acute malnutrition, or other life-threatening effects and consequences;
  2. Protect threatened livelihoods and establish conditions of self-reliance;
  3. Strengthen the capacities of the international humanitarian aid system.

This section will provide a focus of the first two objectives.
Remember that ECHO can only intervene in specific cases and with clear entry and exit criteria.

In line with the Commission’s humanitarian mandate and the Humanitarian Regulation, the Staff Working Document considers the use of food assistance in crisis contexts where food consumption is insufficient or inadequate to avert extreme negative manifestations of transient food insecurity including:

  • excessive mortality,
  • emergency rates of acute malnutrition,
  • detrimental coping mechanisms (e.g. stress displacement or livelihood erosion).

All humanitarian food assistance and complementary activities must be linked to a food-intake intervention logic, and should strive to demonstrate a cost-effective impact on the food consumption and/or nutritional status of targeted beneficiaries.

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