ABSTRACT
In 2010, six million people in Sudan endured starvation and malnutrition and were thus in urgent need of food assistance. 1 The UN mission in Sudan even labeled one town in the south, Akobo, “the hungriest place on earth.” 2 In response to Sudan’s enormous humanitarian needs, the U.S. provided over $500 million in 2010, while the European Commission contributed over $210 million, making the humanitarian operation in Sudan the Commission’s largest. 3 At the same time, the U.S. and EC engagement in Sudan illustrates how donors increasingly pay attention to information gathering and analysis as an important means to align responses with the needs of the hungry. ECHO, for example, routinely conducts monitoring missions in Sudan. During one such mission, ECHO representatives noticed that affected communities had come up with diverse coping strategies to deal with their food insecurity. ECHO discussed what it saw with the WFP, its main implementing partner in Sudan, as well as with other donors, and then decided as a pilot project to reduce rations in one community by 30 percent. This decrease had no observable negative impact on the affected population, showing how useful information gathering and analysis can be. Further, before ECHO scaled up the pilot, it commissioned a study to analyze the coping strategies and possible implications of the reduced rations in other populations to adapt the response accordingly.
