Evaluating the Impact of Humanitarian Aid on Food Security

In the face of climate change-induced droughts, vulnerable regions encounter severe threats to food security, demanding urgent humanitarian assistance. This paper introduces a causal inference framework for the Horn of Africa, aiming to assess the impact of cash-based interventions on food crises. Our contributions encompass identifying causal relationships within the food security system, harmonizing a comprehensive database, and estimating the causal effect of humanitarian interventions on malnutrition. Our results revealed no significant effects, likely due to limited sample size, suboptimal data quality, and an imperfect causal graph resulting from our limited understanding of multidisciplinary systems like food security. This underscores the need to enhance data collection and refine causal models with domain experts for more effective future interventions and policies, improving transparency and accountability in humanitarian aid.