Food security and Livelihood (FSL)

Food Security has a direct impact on the nutritional and health status of people. It exists when “all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.”

As a humanitarian organization focused on the livelihood local communities, our initiatives incorporate four interrelated pillars of food security:

• • Food availability; production, markets and other relative factors that the availability of food
  • Food access; The factors which determine whether can obtain sufficient food
  • Food utilization; factors that determine how people store and use food, feeding practices and health status (e.g., elderly, lactating women).
  • Food stability; The ability of people to rely on food’s availability and access.

At the Coalition for Humanity (CH), Food security and livelihood is one of the main focus areas. The organization supports vulnerable communities affected by conflict to recover and move towards self-reliance. Interventions address two important aspects of the respective communities:

Immediate emergency humanitarian livelihoods support – This is help accorded to the most vulnerable households that have been affected by conflict and other disasters. The program targets internally displaced persons (IDPs), returnees and host communities. In this area, CH has so far supported more than 100,000 individuals across the former Unity State with vegetable seeds, crops, fishing kits and agricultural tools. We trained over 500 Agricultural Extension Workers and Animal health workers (CAHWs).

Long-term food security and livelihood support – This program seeks to empower communities, especially women and other special groups, through different innovative approaches in order to change their lives through training on entrepreneurship and life skills, village farm schools, and village saving and loans associations (VSLAs) and other income-generating activities (IGA) aimed at changing their lives in the long term. Livestock support also forms one core area of engagement within the long-term food security and livelihood support. The Food Security and livelihood programme is integrated and mainstreamed across other programmes that CH is engaged such as Water Hygiene and Sanitation (WASH), Health and nutrition, Protection, GBV and gender empowerment.