This paper reviews six case studies examined as part of a project to review targetting methodologies employed by non‐government organisations in Africa during the 1984‐6 food crisis. Most agencies have not yet fully evaluated the role of data in informing policy decisions during their respective emergency programmes. The case studies presented reflect a wide variety of approaches to targetting emergency food aid that are based largely on the use of ‘socio‐economic’ data. The recent emergency relief operations in Africa seem to indicate a change in relief agencies' approaches to the assessment and monitoring of needs of the affected populations. Earlier dependance on nutritional data has given way to an increasing reliance on the use of socio‐economic indicators. There was a wide variation in the case studies of the type of indicators collected and utilised in needs assessment and monitoring. There were those who relied almost exclusively on nutritional data to target resources during the 1984‐86 African crisis, and others whose experiences during that period lead them to attach more weight to socio‐economic data. Other agencies appear to have recognised the problems of relying solely on nutritional data to target food aid during their 1984–86 emergency programmes, and thus more or less abandoned classical anthropometric surveys in their needs assessment and monitoring methodologies during this period. Thus nutritional data has a less significant role in the decision making process than previously