Advanced Food Security Resilience Planning Training Course

Course overview

Food security teams must make defensible decisions when shocks compound: drought affects production, market disruption raises staple prices, conflict restricts access, and households adopt damaging coping strategies before survey results are complete. Senior practitioners need more than a needs-assessment report; they must translate evidence into prioritised resilience investments, contingency actions, targeting rules, and monitoring thresholds that can withstand donor, government, and community scrutiny. This course addresses the planning gap between diagnosing food insecurity and operating a multi-sector resilience response.

Participants learn to build an evidence-led food security resilience plan using the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), WFP Consolidated Approach for Reporting Indicators of Food Security (CARI), Household Economy Analysis (HEA), market assessment findings, and seasonal calendars. They practise analysing hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and coping-capacity data; identifying livelihood-system constraints; modelling shock scenarios; selecting agriculture, livelihoods, cash, market-support, nutrition-sensitive, and social-protection options; and setting measurable outcome indicators. The course also covers conflict sensitivity, protection risks, accountability to affected populations, adaptive management, and coordination with national systems.

Instruction combines facilitated technical sessions with a continuing resilience-planning case based on a shock-prone livelihood zone. Working in teams, participants clean and interpret assessment data, map risks in QGIS, construct a seasonal response calendar, compare intervention options, and develop decision triggers. Each participant leaves with a completed Food Security Resilience Planning Pack: a context analysis, theory of change, prioritised intervention portfolio, contingency matrix, indicator framework, and 90-day implementation roadmap ready for adaptation to their operating context.

The course is designed for experienced humanitarian, development, government, and donor personnel who influence programme design, portfolio management, assessment, coordination, or resilience investment decisions.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Interpret IPC, CARI, and livelihood evidence to define the severity, drivers, and geographic concentration of food insecurity
• Construct a shock-and-seasonality risk profile using hazard calendars, market signals, and household coping data
• Apply Household Economy Analysis principles to identify livelihood deficits and viable recovery pathways
• Prioritise resilience interventions through a transparent multi-criteria options appraisal matrix
• Develop a food security resilience theory of change linking activities, outputs, outcomes, and shock-responsive assumptions
• Design contingency triggers, decision thresholds, and pre-agreed response actions for predictable food security shocks
• Build an indicator and learning framework that tracks food consumption, livelihoods, market functionality, and resilience capacities
• Produce an operational Food Security Resilience Planning Pack for a defined livelihood zone or programme area

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Food Security Programme Managers — who must convert assessment findings into funded, sequenced resilience portfolios
• Resilience and Livelihoods Advisers — who need to design interventions that protect and restore household livelihood systems
• Humanitarian Programme Coordinators — who align emergency response, early action, and recovery plans across sectors
• MEAL Managers and Assessment Specialists — who must establish credible indicators, triggers, and adaptive-learning cycles
• Government Food Security and Social Protection Officers — who coordinate shock-responsive planning with national systems
• Donor Programme Officers — who assess whether resilience proposals use evidence, realistic assumptions, and measurable outcomes

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience in food security, livelihoods, agriculture, cash programming, social protection, humanitarian response, or development programming. The course assumes familiarity with common assessment concepts such as food consumption, coping strategies, vulnerability, market access, targeting, and logical frameworks. Participants should be comfortable reading tables, percentages, and basic charts, and should bring a laptop capable of running Microsoft Excel and accessing web-based tools. Prior use of IPC, CARI, HEA, KoboToolbox, or QGIS is helpful but not required; the course explains how each is used in planning rather than training participants as specialist classifiers or GIS analysts.

Training methodology

The five days are delivered through instructor-led technical briefings, facilitated analysis of a single shock-prone livelihood-zone case, and structured planning workshops. Participants work with simulated household, market, rainfall, and coping-strategy datasets in Excel, KoboToolbox outputs, and QGIS maps. Small groups test competing intervention choices against seasonal constraints, protection risks, delivery feasibility, and cost considerations. Daily outputs are progressively assembled into an individual resilience plan. The final day uses a peer challenge panel to test assumptions, triggers, indicators, and implementation sequencing before participants complete their 90-day application roadmap.

Course outline

Day 1: Diagnosing food security risk and resilience capacity

• Food security resilience concepts: absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities
• IPC Acute Food Insecurity Classification evidence and phase interpretation
• WFP CARI indicators for current food security outcome analysis
• Hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and coping-capacity analysis
• Livelihood-zone profiling and household wealth-group differentiation
• Seasonal calendars for production, income, expenditure, disease, and lean periods
• Data-quality checks for household surveys, market data, and key-informant findings

Workshop: Participants build a livelihood-zone risk profile from a case dataset and produce a one-page problem statement identifying priority populations, shock drivers, and evidence gaps.

Day 2: Analysing livelihoods, markets, and shock pathways

• Household Economy Analysis baseline concepts and livelihood-deficit estimation
• Income, expenditure, and food-source analysis by wealth group
• Reduced Coping Strategies Index and Livelihood Coping Strategies interpretation
• Market-system mapping for staple foods, agricultural inputs, and labour
• Price monitoring, terms of trade, and market-functionality signals
• Shock scenario construction for drought, conflict, flood, and price spikes
• QGIS mapping of hazard exposure, market access, and food insecurity hotspots

Workshop: Teams model the effect of a drought and staple-price shock on three household groups and create a mapped shock pathway with priority planning implications.

Day 3: Selecting and sequencing resilience interventions

• Intervention pathways for production, income, assets, markets, and consumption
• Cash, voucher, in-kind, and market-support modality selection criteria
• Agriculture and livestock support aligned to seasonal feasibility windows
• Nutrition-sensitive food security programming and household dietary diversity
• Shock-responsive social protection linkages and referral pathways
• Protection, gender, disability inclusion, and conflict-sensitivity screening
• Multi-criteria intervention appraisal using impact, feasibility, risk, cost, and sustainability

Workshop: Participants use an options appraisal matrix to rank six intervention packages and produce a justified, sequenced resilience portfolio for the case area.

Day 4: Designing adaptive plans, triggers, and measurement systems

• Food security resilience theory of change construction
• Assumption mapping and external-risk registers
• Early-warning indicators for rainfall, production, prices, displacement, and coping
• Contingency triggers and pre-agreed decision thresholds
• Outcome indicators for food consumption, livelihoods, market access, and resilience capacities
• Disaggregation plans for gender, age, disability, wealth group, and location
• Adaptive management cycles, after-action reviews, and learning questions

Workshop: Participants develop a theory of change, contingency trigger matrix, and indicator framework that specifies data sources, frequencies, owners, and response actions.

Day 5: Operationalising the Food Security Resilience Planning Pack

• Translating strategic priorities into phased implementation workplans
• Roles, accountabilities, and coordination mechanisms with government and clusters
• Budget logic, unit-cost assumptions, and resource prioritisation
• KoboToolbox form design for routine outcome and trigger monitoring
• Data review dashboards and management decision routines
• Donor-ready narrative structure and evidence annexes
• Implementation readiness review and 90-day action planning

Workshop: Each participant completes and presents a Food Security Resilience Planning Pack, receiving peer and instructor feedback before finalising a 90-day workplace application plan.

Tools & standards covered

Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), WFP Consolidated Approach for Reporting Indicators of Food Security (CARI), KoboToolbox, QGIS

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions