Compare methods

	Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning	Food Consumption Score
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2010	2008
Originator	Paula Bilinsky & Anne Swindale (FANTA)	World Food Programme, Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM)
Type	Recall-based count of months of adequate household food access over a 12-month period	Weighted food-group frequency index of household food consumption
Seminal source	Bilinsky, P., & Swindale, A. (2010). Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning (MAHFP) for Measurement of Household Food Access: Indicator Guide (Version 4). Washington, DC: Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance II Project (FANTA-2), FHI 360.	World Food Programme (2008). Food Consumption Analysis: Calculation and Use of the Food Consumption Score in Food Security Analysis. Rome: WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) Technical Guidance Sheet.
Aliases	MAHFP, FANTA Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning, Adequate Food Provisioning Months Indicator	FCS, WFP Food Consumption Score, Weighted Food Group Frequency Score
Related	3	3
Summary	Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning (MAHFP) is a FANTA food-access indicator, documented by Bilinsky and Swindale in 2010, that captures the temporal dimension of household food security. Rather than asking about the past week or month, it asks the household to recall, across all twelve months of the previous year, in which months it did not have enough food to meet its needs. The number of adequately provisioned months — twelve minus the count of inadequate months — is the MAHFP, ranging from zero to twelve. Because it spans a full year and is anchored to the local seasonal calendar, MAHFP reveals chronic and seasonal food shortfalls that point-in-time measures miss, and its mean and monthly profile are easy to compute and compare.	The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is the World Food Programme's standard household food-security indicator, defined in its 2008 VAM technical guidance. It is a weighted measure of dietary diversity and frequency: enumerators record how many days in the past week a household consumed each of a set of standard food groups, those frequencies are capped at seven and multiplied by weights reflecting each group's nutritional importance, and the weighted sum yields a score from zero to 112. Households are then classified as having poor, borderline, or acceptable food consumption using standard thresholds. Validated against caloric and other food-security measures by Wiesmann and colleagues at IFPRI, the FCS is widely used in emergency and development food-security assessments because it is fast, cheap, and proxies both diet quality and adequacy.