This paper describes the Rasch model-based procedures developed to define the eight-item Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) as a contribution towards the establishment of an indicator for global monitoring of food insecurity.  

The FAO initiative Voices of the Hungry measures food insecurity worldwide, using an experience-based tool that can easily be applied in many different contexts.

The FAO Voices of the Hungry project developed an experience-based food insecurity scale module called the Food Insecurity Experience scale (FIES). The FIES will be used as a common metric for measuring food insecurity at several levels of severity, across different geographic areas and cultures.

This article, published in a German nutrition magazine, focuses on the project Voices of the Hungry (VoH) which assists countries in accessing information on food insecurity as experienced by individuals. VoH implements a measure that allows direct measurement of people’s access to healthy, nutritious food.

The Voices of the Hungry project piloted the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in four African nations in 2013. Examples from the pilots are used to illustrates how the FIES makes it possible to comparatively analyse the food insecurity situation for different groups within a population, such as urban versus rural, or male versus female.

This brief PowerPoint presentation summarizes key aspects of the Voices of the Hungry Project and the concept underlying the Food Insecurity Experience Scale.