Compare methods

	Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning	Seasonal Food Availability Calendar
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2010	1994
Originator	Paula Bilinsky & Anne Swindale (FANTA)	Robert Chambers (Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition)
Type	Recall-based count of months of adequate household food access over a 12-month period	Participatory visual mapping of seasonal variation in food and livelihoods
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.	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953-969.
Aliases	MAHFP, FANTA Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning, Adequate Food Provisioning Months Indicator	Seasonal Calendar, Participatory Seasonal Calendar, Seasonality Mapping, Food Availability Calendar
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 Seasonal Food Availability Calendar is a participatory field method, rooted in Robert Chambers's Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), in which community members themselves construct a visual chart of how food, livelihoods, and stresses vary across the year. Along a time axis of months or local seasons, participants map the timing and relative intensity of rainfall, planting and harvests, food stocks, market prices, labor demand, hunger, and illness, often using stones, beans, or marks to score each period. The resulting calendar makes the community's lean season visible and explains its drivers — when harvests run out, prices spike, work disappears, and hunger peaks. It is valued for surfacing local knowledge about seasonality that surveys taken at one point in time cannot capture.