Months of Adequate Household Food Provisioning

Experience-based scales measure the severity and lived experience of food insecurity within a recent period — how badly and how often a household compromised its eating. MAHFP instead measures the temporal extent of adequate access across a whole year: how many months the household had enough food. They are complementary. A household might score acceptably on severity at the time of interview yet have several inadequate months earlier in the year that only MAHFP's twelve-month recall would reveal, which is why the two are often collected together.

Asking people to remember whether each of twelve past months was adequate is demanding, and abstract month names provide weak memory cues. Anchoring each month to concrete local reference points — the maize harvest, a major festival, the onset of the rains — gives respondents a timeline they can reconstruct accurately. Without this anchoring, shortages may be misplaced in time, distorting both the household MAHFP and, more seriously, the population seasonality profile that depends on correct month-by-month reporting.

The mean tells you, on average, how many months households were food-adequate, but not when the shortfalls occurred. Aggregating the binary monthly indicators across households yields the share reporting inadequate food in each calendar month, which reveals the shape and timing of the lean season. This profile is what makes MAHFP operationally valuable: it tells programs exactly which months to target with assistance or other support, information the single mean cannot convey.