Global Estimates of Children’s and Young Person’s Food Insecurity using the Gallup World Poll

Dr. Ashu Handa
UNC-CH Professor of Pubic Policy and CPC Faculty Fellow

Professor Handa is currently on-leave from UNC serving as Chief of Social & Economic Policy at UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti, Florence, Italy. At UNICEF he leads the Innocenti Report Card Series, UNICEF’s flagship publication on the well-being of children in rich countries. The 2014 Report Card, which Handa led, focused on the impact of the great recession on child poverty, and was featured in over 100 major media outlets including the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian (UK), Republica (Italy), El Pais (Spain), AP, and Reuters. The current Report Card, scheduled to be launched in March 2016, tracks bottom-end inequality among children in 41 rich countries over time, measured through children’s health, education and income. Professor Handa is one of eight researchers awarded access to the food security scale that the FAO incorporated into the Gallup World Poll through their Voices of the Hungry project

While at Innocenti, Dr. Handa continues to be actively engaged in CPC activities. Three CPC predoctoral trainees and four CPC Faculty Fellows visited Innocenti in 2013-14 for workshops and research collaboration. He also continues to actively manage his CPC-based grant portfolio as Principal Investigator on the Transfer Project (Transfer Project), a collaboration between CPC, UNICEF, FAO and Save the Children. The Transfer Project is a multi-country research initiative to study the impact of national cash transfer programs on poverty and human development.