The purpose of this indicator is to provide a measure to track progress made in ending/halting hunger.

The prevalence of undernourishment is an estimate of the proportion of the population whose habitual food consumption is insufficient to provide the dietary energy levels that are required to maintain a normal active and healthy life.

Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Annual

Percentage (%)

This indicator allows for monitoring of trends in the extent of dietary energy inadequacy in a population over time, generated as a result of the combination of changes in the overall availability of food, in the households’ ability to access it, and in the socio-demographic characteristics of the population.

Undernourishment is defined as the condition by which a person has access, on a regular basis, to amounts of food that are insufficient to provide the energy required for conducting a normal, healthy and active life, given his or her own dietary energy requirements.

The scope for disaggregation thus crucially depends on the availability of surveys designed to be representative at the level of sub national population groups. Given prevailing practice in the design of national household surveys, sufficient reliable information is seldom available for disaggregation beyond the level of macro area of residence (urban-rural) and of the main Provinces/Divisions in a country. To the extent that most of the used surveys are designed to accurately capture the distribution of income, inference can be drawn on the PoU in different income classes of the population. Gender disaggregation is limited by the possibility to identify and group households by gender-related information (such as sex of the head of the household, or male/female ratio).

The indicator is computed at the population level. To this aim, the population is represented by an “average” individual for which a probability distribution of the habitual daily dietary energy intake levels is modelled through a parametric probability density function (pdf). The indicator is obtained as the cumulative probability that daily habitual dietary energy intakes (x) are below the lower bound of the range of normal dietary energy requirements for that representative, or average individual (MDER), as in the formula below: PoU = ∫_(x

PoU can be used to help the government and agencies in identifying trends in population-level undernourishment. PoU is also used to calculate the depth of food deficit indicator, which estimates the average per capita amount of additional energy (kcal) that undernourished individuals need to consume to reach their average dietary energy requirement.

Due to the probabilistic nature of the inference and the margins of uncertainty associated with estimates of each of the parameters in the model, the precision of the PoU estimates is generally low.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.