Developing a monitoring process for IPC Acute Food Insecurity analyses

Abstract

Due to climate change, man-made conflicts, and rising inflation, a growing number of people around the world are struggling to have consistent access to safe and nutritious food. This phenomenon is known as food insecurity (FI). Therefore, we take in this thesis the first steps towards developing a monitoring process for assessing FI using Human-Centered AI (HCAI). We developed this process for, and in collaboration with, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). The IPC is an organization that helps countries classify levels of food insecurity in their regions to inform humanitarian decision-making. During our research process, we found that any form of HCAI for the IPC would need to be informed by input from their domain experts, and we concluded that we could not start implementing HCAI until we found a way to formalize their input in a way that was robust and suited their technical capabilities. To this end, we ran an experiment with 18 IPC experts in Malawi to see whether they could quantify their assumptions by setting thresholds for food security drivers. The results are encouraging but show that there is still much to be done to bridge the gap between domain knowledge and technical expertise. We also show in this thesis that there is a lack of real-life case studies on HCAI development and share therefore our lessons learned from our real-world HCAI case study on FI monitoring. In this way, we hope to promote the development of a practice-informed methodology for HCAI.