# **1. Introduction**

The share of the world’s poor that live in fragile and conflict environments is projected to increase to over 50 percent by 2030, which suggests that much of the last mile of eradicating extreme poverty will occur in the midst of security and humanitarian emergencies (e.g., World Bank 2018a). The humanitarian-development nexus that is evolving to address these needs is increasingly providing large amounts of assistance in conflict environments to help minimize the long-term adverse impacts of health and nutrition shocks, and to try to sustain livelihoods until peace can be achieved (e.g., Oxfam 2019).

Despite the significant increase in assistance in humanitarian emergencies, little is known about how well assistance is targeted to those in the most need given a lack of data in the midst of fragile environments. There is growing evidence that assistance targeted to those most in need is the most effective at staving off the worst welfare outcomes (e.g., Kurdi et al. 2019). Additionally, targeting strategies are potentially very important to ensure that assistance might not have adverse impacts on the conflict itself. Although assistance has a stabilizing effect in some settings (e.g., Nielson et al. 2011, Berman et al. 2011), there has been an increase in conflict or the duration of conflict in response to assistance in other settings (e.g., Crost et al. 2014). The empirical ambiguity of the effect assistance has on conflict suggests that it is not assistance itself that increases conflict, but rather the type of assistance and the manner in which it is distributed that determines whether humanitarian operations might support the worst off while not worsening the conflict (e.g., Berman et al. 2013).

This article investigates the change in humanitarian assistance following a particularly interesting event- the announcement of a food emergency in Yemen in 2017. The United Nations announced the 2017 Integrated Food Security and Phase Classification (IPC) in March of 2017, which is a classification system that identifies food emergencies. Although the 2017 IPC announcement did not officially declare a famine, the announcement detailed a dire food emergency facing Yemen, and humanitarian agencies began describing the food emergency with more urgency (e.g., OCHA 2016, OCHA 2017).<sup>1</sup> In order to empirically estimate the impacts of the 2017 IPC announcement, this analysis utilizes a novel mobile phone survey conducted by the World Food Programme (WFP) that provides high-frequency data on food assistance and food access that are regionally disaggregated. The survey is one of the most complete data sources describing the evolution of food assistance during the course of a humanitarian disaster and offers a unique opportunity to investigate the targeting of humanitarian assistance. Although the survey misses households without access to mobile phones who potentially are more in need of assistance, the relatively high penetration of mobile phones allows an analysis of targeting for the majority of the population.

The 2017 IPC announcement led to an almost immediate and significant increase in the share of respondents receiving food assistance in the country that further increased in the year-and-a-

> 1Food insecurity was already widespread in the early stages of the war (e.g., Tandon 2019), and the empirical analysis demonstrates that they was not a large change in food security in the country leading up to the announcement of the 2017 IPC. Section 2 presents possible reasons why the 2017 IPC announcement might have had a larger impact than other IPC announcements.

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