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(provide details on the process for each phase/product of the HPC)
- Exploratory
- Aggregation, disaggregation
- Chronologies, timelines
- SDR
- Describe
- Prioritization (sudden onset)
- Severity (sudden onset)
- Explain
- Cause and effect
- Interpret
- Ratings, rankings and uncertainty
- Anticipate
- Prediction, forecasting
- scenario building
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Exploratory Analysis
Focus: To identify Identify if data required is available (credible, reliable, timely) and structure it in a way that best suit the requirement and identifies information gaps.
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- Familiarise yourself with the data and check its characteristics - How relevant, sufficient and reliable is the data?
- Clean and enrich your data to ensure it is as good as it gets - How clean and ready for analysis is the data? Do I have enough data?
- Are potential signals hidden in the data?
- Sort, aggregate and disaggregate and define suitable taxonomy of categories. Code & refine your data – Can the data be better prepared for queries?
- Timelines and chronologies can be used to analyse the data
- What are the main results so far?
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- There is a variety of information sources on food insecurity in country X, primarily from IPC, Fewsnet, WFP and FAO.
- Some are purely observational, some are quantitative.
- Recent figures on food security are available after a comprehensive national survey by WFP
- Findings are mostly aligned.
- No recent information is available from the southern region where accessibility is limited
- There seem to be higher levels of food insecurity in rural areas.
OCHA Process and product: Secondary Data Review (SDR), DEEP, COD Workplan,
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Descriptive Analysis
Focus: Summarise and describe the data, to reduce the amount of data and make it easier to compare. Comparison is key to analysis.
Main activities and questions
- What is written in these sources? What does the data tell us about a given situation? Who is affected, where, how many people?
- Group similar observations and reduce your data - What meaningful comparisons reveal differences?
- Select the metric that best describes the situation – How can I summarise my data in a way that best describes it?
- Compare and contrast between and within groups of data to identify meaningful and significant differences and similarities - What consistent patterns, trends, or anomalies emerge from the data? Compare to what?
- Humanitarian standards (e.g. humanitarian conditions vs SPHERE standards)
- Time (e.g. Pre- vs in-crisis)
- Geographic (e.g. Governorate A. vs Governorate B.)
- Population group (e.g. Refugees vs IDPs)
Examples of Descriptive analysis findings
- There are 15 million people in country X who are food insecure.
- The large majority is in rural areas.
- Conflict-affected areas such as district A, B, and C have the highest proportion of food insecure people about the total population.
- The proportion of food insecure people has more than doubled in the last five years.
OCHA Process and products: Prioritization and severity models (especially in sudden onset)
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Explanatory
Focus: Provide answers to the questions of why something is happening, and what factors are at play to make a situation occur. Why is it like this? What are the plausible and rival explanation(s)? Look for associations and correlations. Discover and explain associations or cause-effect relations between different attributes, factors, and events.
Main activities and questions
- Connect the dots. Look for association and correlation – What follows what?
- Link causes to effects – What happened next?
- Review processes & underlying factors – How does it work?
- Develop plausible explanations and entertain competing explanations – What else could explain this?
Examples of Explanatory analysis findings
- Current food insecurity is linked to the blockade starting in November 2017, severely restricted imports of essential goods.
- People in rural areas suffer food insecurity mostly for lack of food products and diversity in markets. In urban areas, food insecurity is driven by lack of financial resources and social discrimination.
- Before the blockade, Country X already faced the largest food security emergency in the world, with the on-going conflict destructing assets, infrastructure and food sources.
OCHA Process and products
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Interpretive:
Anticipatory:
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