National workshop on Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) data analysis in Bogotá (Colombia)

FAO is conducting a workshop from September 25 to 30, 2023 in Bogotá, Colombia to strengthen the technical capabilities of professionals and other delegates of the Comisión Intersectorial de Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutricional – CISAN, for the measurement of the prevalence of food insecurity, through the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES).

Colombia generated estimates of food insecurity through the Encuesta Nacional de Calidad de Vida (ECV2022) survey, published in July 2023. This survey, conducted annually by DANE, received support from the FAO regional office for estimation of food security indicators. Since the release of these estimates, government institutions have shown interest in using this information for designing social policies and monitoring food insecurity as additional data to continuously monitor food insecurity in the country. These government institutions have also utilized the FIES scale as part of the tools to assess the impact of implemented social protection policies.

Upon request from PROSPERIDAD SOCIAL, a work agenda is defined to analyze FIES data generated by the institution and train the professionals to understand the methodology.

Expected Outcomes:

• The origins, theoretical foundation and FAO’s methodology of FIES is explained in detail to strengthen the technical capacity of the professionals to estimate FIES- based food security indicator.
• Hands-on training on processing of FIES data and estimation of the indicator is conducted through R scripts and FAO-developed Shiny-App FIES tool using the data provided by them from the IRACA project.
• Concepts of validation of FIES data, fitting of Rasch model and calibration of national scale to the global scale are thoroughly covered.