It is important to ensure an ‘age-wide’ lens in humanitarian action and to recognize the impact of humanitarian emergencies on people of different age groups. Working with and for children, young people or older persons is not only about serving an underserved population; they should participate in planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The FSC Coordinator should understand the needs and priorities of all people in an emergency.
The Coordinator should aim to:
- Disseminate the guidance in the Humanitarian Inclusion Standards for Older People and People with Disabilities and the Food Security and Livelihoods Inclusion Standards. These include key actions aimed at addressing barriers and improving participation and resilience of people from across all age groups and diversities, across all phases of the HPC.
- Promote specific efforts to engage children, young people, and older persons in assessments, programme design, and monitoring and evaluation. This includes adapting existing tools and training teams on age-appropriate methodologies, as well as establishing child-friendly feedback mechanisms.
- Where possible, identify a focal point for different age groups to support this (e.g. HelpAge for older people, if present), encourage attention to the needs of each age group, including by tackling age discrimination, and encourage FSC partners to make services and distributions inclusive and accessible to all age groups.
- Ensure data disaggregation by age, gender and disability in all FSC documents and activities. For example, include an age and gender analysis in the HNO describing how adolescent girls or older persons (and persons with disabilities) face food insecurity in different ways and have different coping capacities.
See also the recommended FSC Coordinator actions common for all cross-cutting concerns in 5.7.6.
Support: Contact the global Food Security cluster Helpdesk.
Guidance and Resources:
- See the Food Security and Livelihoods Inclusion Standards in the Humanitarian Inclusion Standards for Older People and People with Disabilities. See also Standard 21 on Food Security and CP and Standard 22 on Livelihoods and CP in the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (CPMS) and Standard 25 on Nutrition and CP.
- The Mainstreaming AAP and Core People-Related Issues in the HPC (gFSC/GNC2015) can help with integration of age, disability, gender and protection in food security programming.
- IASC advocacy paper: Humanitarian Action and Older Persons - an essential brief for humanitarian actors (2008).
- See more resources on food security and age on the FSC website here.