significant intake shortfalls that cannot be met and result in high levels of acute malnutrition, and at least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food that results in starvation.

In the announcement for Yemen, two governorates were identified as IPC 2; 10 governorates were identified as IPC 3; three governorates were identified as being IPC 3, but would be classified as IPC 4 if it were not for humanitarian assistance (we refer to these regions as IPC 3+); and seven governorates were identified as IPC 4.<sup>4</sup> Throughout, we analyze how the distribution of food assistance changed following the 2017 IPC announcement, and how the distribution of assistance varied based on each governorate’s IPC classification.

The 2017 IPC announcement listed 16 separate quantitative and qualitative data sources that were available to be used to collect all the different types of indicators used in the classification, including the high-frequency mobile phone survey used in this analysis.<sup>5</sup> However, the data source listed most prominently in the announcement was the Emergency Food Security and Nutrition Assessment (EFSNA), which was conducted between November and December 2016. Furthermore, it is important to note that accessibility issues in Yemen since the beginning of the conflict in 2015 have made it difficult to collect data in the country that is necessary for the IPC classification. For example, the EFSNA avoided the two most conflict-affected governorates, was potentially plagued by a host of logistical difficulties given the security situation in the regions they were able to access, and was further made difficult by the structural break that has occurred since the last census. Thus, it is difficult to know how representative the survey is of the entire population (FAO 2017).

One example of how this difficulty in collecting data affected the 2017 IPC classification was the use of internal displacement, which was one of the statistics mentioned prominently by the official announcement. However, it is very difficult to accurately identify the size of the displaced population in the country. For example, the monthly mobile phone survey conducted by the WFP used in this analysis and the Gallup World Poll both find that the size of the displaced population is up to three times as large as is being identified by the Task Force for Population Movement (TFPM), which is the official source used in the IPC 2017 classification (e.g., World Bank 2017, WFP 2018a).

Despite these difficulties in constructing the 2017 IPC announcement, the classification had a large impact and the messaging around the food emergency in the country gained a new urgency. Even though the there was little change between the 2016 and 2017 IPC announcements, and even though the 2017 IPC announcement did not declare a famine, the humanitarian and development community began describing ”famine-like conditions” in the country and the importance of avoiding a famine (e.g., Nebehay 2017, OCHA 2017). However, there was no reference to famine in the last humanitarian needs assessment completed before the 2017 IPC announcement (e.g., OCHA 2016).

One potential reason for the larger impact was increased global attention on the food emergencies at the time of the 2017 IPC announcement. In March 2017, during a Security Council meeting, the U.N. declared that 20 million people faced starvation amid a funding gap in Nige-

> 4See Appendix 1 for the map identifying the IPC classification of each governorate.

> 5The survey- the mobile Vulnerability and Analysis Mapping Survey- is described in Section 3.

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