FEWS NET

Background

FEWS NET, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, provides analyses on acute food insecurity.

FEWS NET uses the IPC scale, which consists of 5 classes, where 1 indicates minimal food insecurity and 5 famine.

FEWS NET has been publishing data since 2009 for a selection of countries.

The data contains figures for the Current Situation, Near-Term projections, and Medium term projections. This data is published 3 times a year, where each projection period has a validity of 4 months. Till 2016 data was published 4 times a year, where the projection periods had a validity of 3 months. In some exceptional cases where the situation has significantly changed from the projected situation, additional updates are published.

FEWS NET publishes its data as maps on their website and this same data can be downloaded in the format of a shapefile. The maps either cover a region, e.g. East Africa, or a country. Each country is divided into livelihood areas, and to each livelihood area an IPC phase is assigned. This assigned phase is the highest phase at which at least 20% of the region’s population is classified. The only data provided is thus one phase per livelihood zone, i.e the distribution of the population per phase is not provided. For some livelihood areas there might be no data available, which is indicated by a value of 99.

Besides this machine readable data, FEWS NET publishes elaborate reports that explain the context of the data. These reports can also be found on their website.

Usage

To use this class, you first need to create a country configuration for the country you would like to use:

from ochanticipy import create_country_config
country_config = create_country_config(iso3="eth")

Next you need to instantiate the FEWS NET class with the country config:

from ochanticipy import FewsNet
fewsnet = FewsNet(country_config=country_config)

Upon first use, you will need to downlaod the FEWS NET data. The code downloads one date per call. You thus need to input the publication year and month of your data of interest. This normally refers to the start month of the Current Situation period, which is indicated when you browse the data on the FEWS NET website. For some dates only regional data is available, other dates have availability of country files. The code automatically downloads the country file if available and else download the file covering the region the country is located in.

An example of the use of the download function:

fewsnet.download(pub_year=2021, pub_month=6)

Next, use the load method to begin working with the data as a GeoPandas dataframe. The code loads one projection period per call. The valid inputs of the projeciton period are CS (Current Situation), ML1 (Near Term projection), and ML2 (Medium Term projection). An example of the load function thus is :

gdf_202106_ml1 = fewsnet.load(pub_year=2021, pub_month=6, projection_period="ML1")

The full code snippet is below in case you would like to copy it:

from ochanticipy import create_country_config, FewsNet
country_config = create_country_config(iso3="eth")
fewsnet = FewsNet(country_config=country_config)
fewsnet.download(pub_year=2021, pub_month=6)
gdf_202106_ml1 = fewsnet.load(pub_year=2021, pub_month=6, projection_period="ML1")

Configuration

The FEWS NET portion of the configuration file should be setup as follows:

fewsnet:
    region_name: east-africa

Makes sure FEWS NET covers the country of interest. You can see which countries are covered on their website by clicking on COUNTRIES & REGIONS. Here you can also see which region the country belongs to. This information needs to be added to the country config. The valid values of the region name are caribbean-central-america, central-asia, east-africa, southern-africa, and west-africa.