26 June 2014

Is a commitment to hunger reduction the same as a commitment to undernutrition reduction? No.


So the new HANCI rankings are out.  As usual the report breaks down commitments into hunger and undernutrition reduction.  My favourite graph is the one above.

The closer a country is to 1, 1 the closer it is to being top ranked in both dimensions.  So Guatemala (GTM) does really well on both counts.  Lesotho (LSO) does well on hunger commitment but relatively poorly on undernutrition commitment, Bangladesh (BGD) does well on undernutrition but less so on hunger reduction.

Several things are worth noting:

  1. Performance in the two dimensions is linked, but weakly (low R-squared) and you can see this just from looking at the (very scattered) scatterplot
  2. Countries below the fitted line are doing better in undernutrition reduction commitment than predicted by their hunger reduction commitment score (e.g. Ethiopia, ETH). Countries above the line are doing worse in undernutrition reduction commitment than their hunger reduction commitment would suggest (e.g. India, IND)
  3. If you draw a 45 degree line through the 0,0 point we can see who has a more balanced (high and low) approach to commitment: Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Malawi, Ghana, Philippines, Vietnam (high to medium commitment on both counts) and Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria and Guinea Bissau (medium to low commitment on both counts)

The HANCI report also has some really nice in depth primary data collection work on Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, working with different stakeholder groups in these countries.

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