Port-au-Prince Urban Baseline: Food Security and Livelihoods Assessment
- FEWS NET and CNSA prepared an urban livelihood baseline for Port-au-Prince's poor neighborhoods using the Household Economy Approach.
- The assessment was conducted during a period of relative security and stable prices after the 2008 hurricanes, price rises and food riots.
- The study divided slum households into very poor, poor, middle and better-off wealth groups.
- Very poor households lived near survival limits, relied on low-paid informal work and had the highest dependency ratios.
- All wealth groups purchased most food, but the very poor did not meet full minimum food needs and consumed a very limited diet.
- The report highlights education costs, food-price shocks, political insecurity, natural disasters and limited coping capacity as central vulnerabilities for urban poor households.
Prepared by Sam Dixon and Julius Holt under a FEWS NET contract with USAID, from fieldwork carried out in April and May 2009, this establishes the urban reference situation for Port-au-Prince through an assessment of food security and livelihoods. Urban livelihoods baselines are rare for Haiti, and this one has particular value for its timing: completed eight months before the January 2010 earthquake, it documents how the capital's households earned and spent immediately before the event that displaced much of the city. The corpus holds a good deal on post-earthquake Port-au-Prince and comparatively little on the city as it was before.
How to cite
Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET); United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 2009, Port-au-Prince Urban Baseline: Food Security and Livelihoods Assessment, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Evaluation-Secu-Alim-et-des-moyens-dexistence-a-PAP.pdf