are very close to the average reported in 2017 given the very small share of the population that lives in the regions classified as IPC 2.

And lastly, prior to the 2017 IPC announcement, there were significant differences across IPC regions in the share of respondents that received food assistance in the past month. Essentially nobody received food assistance in IPC 2 regions; approximately 10 percent of respondents received assistance in IPC 3 regions; and slightly more than 20 percent received food assistance in both IPC 3+ and IPC 4 regions.<sup>25</sup> However, it is important to stress that the lack of difference in food access between all regions with an IPC classification that was more severe than IPC 2 is difficult to precisely interpret. For example, the lack of a difference could be driven by differences in the underlying data, where the mVAM is a mobile phone survey and the 2017 IPC used a variety of face-toface surveys, key informant information, and other types of sources. Or the results could be consistent with the IPC classification being driven by some of the other indicators aside from food access. But regardless of the exact reason, food access was similarly poor across much of the mobile phone-using population in the country at the time of the 2017 IPC.

# **5. The Evolution of Food Assistance and Food Access over the Course of the Food Emergency**

# **5a. Empirical Strategy**

This article primarily focuses on the change in food assistance and food access following the 2017 IPC announcement. The overall goal is to better understand if the humanitarian community can quickly and effectively respond to new threats, and the degree to which assistance helps improve food access. Focusing on the change in food assistance is important to better understand the speed with which the humanitarian community responds, and to better understand if the population with the most needs receive the most increase in assistance. Furthermore, the change further allows us to estimate the impact that assistance has on food access, which can be easier to interpret than a simple correlation between food assistance and food access. Illustrating the evolution of food assistance, Figure 3a reports the average share of respondents that received food assistance in the past month for each month of the survey. The share receiving food assistance amongst the mobile phone-using population was stable in the yearand-a-half leading up to the 2017 IPC announcement, and was approximately between 10 and 15 percent. However, within months of the announcement, the share receiving assistance more than doubled from approximately 15 percent to above 35 percent by July of 2017. Furthermore, figures 3b-3e demonstrate that there was a jump in the share for each of the four IPC classifications designated in the 2017 IPC announcement.

Although there was a large increase in the share receiving food assistance nearly immediately following the 2017 IPC announcement, Figure 4 demonstrates that there not an improvement of a similar magnitude in food access at the same time. Neither the FCS nor the rCSI jumped

> 25As discussed in previous sections, IPC 3+ denotes regions that are classified as IPC 3, but would have been IPC 4 in absence of humanitarian assistance.

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