USAID Office of Food for Peace Burkina Faso Bellmon ... - CiteSeerX

BEST ANALYSIS – BURKINA FASO
Prepared by Fintrac Inc.
Take-home rations can act as an effective incentive to promote school attendance, particularly
of girls, by partially compensating poor households for the lost income or the time children
would normally have spent working at home during school hours.
Awardees should determine whether or not take-home rations are appropriate to ensure schoolbased
meals are not substituting for home consumption, but are in fact additional consumption.
For further guidance on the appropriate design of FFE activities,
please see USAID’s Commodities Reference Guide, accessible via
http://www.usaid.gov/our work/humanitarian assistance/ffp/crg/module3.html
6.4.3 Prevention of Malnutrition in Children Under Two Approach (PM2A)
PM2A presents both an opportunity for long-term human capital investment and a unique
challenge to avoid disincentives in the short-to-medium term. While the traditional recuperative
approach targets children who are already malnourished and may have severe, irreversible
physical and cognitive damage, PM2A provides food aid to all children between the ages of 6 to
24 months and within a target geographic area. As with the traditional recuperative nutrition
approach, the PM2A also targets pregnant and lactating women with Behavior Change
Communication (BCC), preventive health care, and food supplementation. Because the key
PM2A targeting criteria are based on a child’s age and a women’s physiological status, rather
than on an estimated household food deficit, distributed rations under PM2A activities have
greater potential to provide food aid to households for whom the food aid would not represent
additional consumption. Initial geographic targeting of areas with a greater proportion of fooddeficit
households, as identified by secondary sources prior to program implementation, will help
avoid disruption of local production and markets.
Geographic Targeting and Beneficiary Coverage
Because of the localized nature of the impact of distributed food aid, the vulnerability of small
markets to disruptions, and the sensitivity of small farmers to production disincentives,
quantities which may appear insignificant compared to a country’s total food staple consumption
can nonetheless have a major impact on markets and production at the local level.
To assess the relative absorptive capacity of food aid on a sub-national basis in Burkina Faso,
thereby providing Bellmon guidance on the appropriate magnitude of distributed food aid under
a PM2A activity, this report relies on two proxy indicators of additionality: cereal poverty and
chronic malnutrition of children under five years of age. Based on a review of the most recent
secondary data including Enquête Nationale de l’Insécurité Alimentaire et de la Malnutrition
(ENIAM) 2009, Food Security Programming Strategy (FSPS) 2009, Demographic and Health
Survey (DHS), Direction Générale de la Promotion de l’Economie Rurale (DGPER) 2009,
13
World Health Organization (WHO) 2005, cereal poverty and stunting prevalence (height-for-
13 DGPER (2009) is source of cereal poverty data. OMS (2005) is source of HFA data reported in ENIAM.
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