A Method for Assessing Food Security Information System

This paper develops a method for assessing food security information system with respect to its structure, connectedness and performance. The paper illustrates how to set up an operational food security information system, identify its leverage components and pathways of information flow, and qualitatively measure its performance in terms of utility obtained from the information. Both a workshop and a questionnaire are designed as means of gathering the data required for the measurement of the performance. The workshop identifies priority information flow patterns and the associated utilities, while the questionnaire gathers the data for the estimation of the organizational learning and information dissemination capacities. Finally, the evaluation of the system is put in perspective by integrating the traditional structure-conduct-performance approach into the method developed.