The Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) is a Government-led, multi-agency body that is mandated by the Government to conduct vulnerability assessments and analyses (VAA) to provide timely early warning information on the food security situation in the country. The Committee was formed in 2002 following the Southern African Food Crisis of 2001-2002 and it has been in operation since then.

MVAC Secretariat
The Secretariat of the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee is based at the Monitoring and Evaluation Division in the Ministry of Economic Planning, Development and Public Sector Reforms at Capital Hill in Lilongwe. MVAC reports and publications may be obtained from this office.

Key Stakeholders
The MVAC draws its membership from Government Ministries, Agencies and Departments (MDAs), UN Agencies, Civil Society Organizations, local and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and the academia. The main stakeholders of MVAC are: Ministry Economic Planning and Development and Public Sector Reforms; Ministry of Agriculture; Ministry of Health (including Department of Nutrition & HIV and AIDS); National Statistics Office; Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development; Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA), international and local NGOs (in food security & humanitarian interventions), academia (University of Malawi, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR)), Food Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET), USAID, DFID, UN agencies (FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, WFP), Irish Aid, Norwegian Embassy, and other development partners.

MVAC Mandate
The MVAC is mandated to carry out assessments that provide timely early warning information on the food security situation in the country. These assessments measure the impact of agricultural, socio-economic and environmental conditions on the lives and livelihoods of the poor. The main objective of these assessments is to identify the number of households affected by these conditions and quantify the required food entitlement. Thus, MVAC identifies groups of people with missing food entitlement, when they will have missing food entitlement, where they are located, and make suggestions on ways to best deal with the situation. The missing food entitlements are then translated into maize and cash equivalents. This information feeds into the programming of humanitarian assistance as well as the formulation of Government strategies and policies.

Methodology
Up to 2016, the MVAC has been using the Household Economy Approach (HEA) to determine the vulnerable and food insecure population in Malawi. The HEA is a livelihoods based approach developed by Save the Children in the early 1990s which attempts to understand how households earn a living i.e how they obtain their food, income and how they spend their income. It also attempts to quantify the likely impacts of hazards or shocks on households’ ability to access enough food or income to meet their minimum food requirements or minimum livelihood needs. It allows for forecasting of future food security and livelihood needs which is an important area of focus when it comes to the provision of early warning information to decision makers. HEA fared particularly well in Malawi because of its advantages, among them: a quick method for collecting data, cost-effectiveness, and ease to generalize to a large population based on the energy deficit. 

The HEA had its limitations, however, among them it was not robust enough as it did not provide room for spatial and inter-temporal comparisons where trends can be generated which help to determine the short and medium term strategies response priorities. In addition, the HEA was determining the food insecure population based on energy deficit only as opposed to the use of a wide range of evidence from the different sources. Consequently, the MVAC adopted the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) in 2016. Since then, the Committee has been using IPC to classify the severity and magnitude of Acute Food Insecurity. 

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) is a set of tools and procedures used to classify the severity and characteristics of acute food and nutrition crises as well as chronic food insecurity based on international standards. It consists of four mutually reinforcing functions, each with a set of specific protocols (tools and procedures). The core IPC parameters include Consensus Building, Convergence of Evidence, Accountability, Transparency and Comparability. The approach classifies areas (districts, cities, Bomas etc) into five phases; 1. Minimal, 2. Stressed, 3. Crisis, 4. Emergency and 5. Famine.

The IPC analysis aims at informing emergency response as well as medium and long-term food security policy and programming. For the IPC, Acute Food Insecurity is defined as any manifestation of food insecurity found in a specified area at a specific point in time of a severity that threatens lives or livelihoods, or both, regardless of the causes, context or duration. It is highly susceptible to change and can occur and manifest in a population within a short amount of time, as a result of sudden changes or shocks that negatively impact on the determinants of food insecurity. The IPC has several advantages, among them: global and national applicability; comparability over space and time; convergence of evidence; technical consensus; transparency through evidence-based analysis; better accountability; and identification of data gaps. By adopting the IPC, there is value addition in that the Committee uses a standardised technical tool for food security analysis using available secondary data to gauge relative food insecurity across the various districts in the country.