The Food and Nutrition Security Resilience Programme in South Sudan

Book excerpt: This report acts as a baseline for the Food and Nutrition Security Resilience Programme (FNS-REPRO) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), a four-year programme of USD 28 million funded by the Government of the Netherlands. This programme contributes directly to the operationalization of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2417 by addressing the “cause-effect” relationship between conflict and food insecurity in Somaliland, the Sudan (Darfur) and South Sudan. The programme, which became operational in October 2019, is designed to foster peace and food security at scale through a multi-year livelihood- and resilience-based approach. The FNS-REPRO component in South Sudan focuses on developing the seed sector value chain: first and foremost with the objective to close the cereal production gap, while eventually providing more diversified products for local, national and export markets. The purpose of the study is to collect baseline values for identified project indicators, which will be tracked over time and used to establish the impact of the project. In addition, it identifies and documents lessons learned that will facilitate the continuous realignment of the current project’s theory of change and assist in defining and designing similar future food security projects in South Sudan as well as in other parts of the world with similar contexts. The baseline study was structured around the project indicators that can be measured at household level as well as indicators that will be used to estimate household resilience capacity. Estimation of the household resilience capacity is done using the FAO RIMA-II tool. Overall, the study employed a panel design with both intervention and comparison households. The current baseline survey focused on Yambio and Torit counties, the first areas of the project roll-out. The data collection covered about 600 households from the two counties (407 treatment and 192 control) in October 2020.