This document provides operational guidance for the collection and tabulation of the Household Hunger Scale (HHS)—a new, simple indicator to measure household hunger in food insecure areas.

The HHS is different from other household food insecurity indicators in that it has been specifically developed and validated for cross-cultural use.

This means that the HHS produces valid and comparable results across cultures and settings so that the status of different population groups can be described in a meaningful and comparable way—to assess where resources and programmatic interventions are needed and to design, implement, monitor, and evaluate policy and programmatic interventions.

Terri Ballard, from the EC-FAO Food Security Programme is a co-author of the guide.