Learn about Livelihoods
Livelihoods are:
"The means by which households obtain and maintain access to essential resources to ensure their immediate and long-term survival."
The means by which households obtain access to essential resources is influenced by a range of factors including geography, agro-ecology, ownership of productive assets, and inter-household relationships. The geography and agro-ecology of an area determines what people are able to produce or grow while access to productive assets and inter-household relationships dictate the extent to which people are capable of meeting their food and cash needs. The degree to which households are able to maintain access depends on their capacity to withstand and recover from hazards that hinder regular access to food and income.
For the purpose of food security analysis and early warning, the is useful for understanding how household vulnerability to particular hazards relate to risk of food insecurity. FEWS NET?s livelihoods analysis, which is based on the Household Economy Approach (HEA), is organized around the central concepts in the Disaster Risk Reduction framework. It provides a practical means for making the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) framework operational.
In HEA, livelihoods baseline information constitutes the ?vulnerability? and ?coping? information (including assets, sources of food and income, expenditure patterns, and coping capacities), collected and organized by livelihood zone and quantified by wealth group. The ?hazard? information is derived from climate, production, policy, market and other information. The ?risk analysis? combines both sets of information in order to judge the likeliness of a severe gap in household food access.