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Livelihood strategy quantification
A description of how people acquire food and cash is a component of many approaches to livelihood analysis. The difference with HEA is that it provides quantitative results; information is gathered on how much food or cash households gain from a particular source, and on how much they spend on certain items and basic services over the defined period.
Such quantification is needed in order to allow a new situation – say, the closing off of employment from a particular source, or poor rains – to be judged in terms of its likely effect on livelihoods. Try and imagine how you could estimate the effect of a shock on livelihoods in concrete terms – say, in terms of a percent decline in food or cash income – if you simply had a list of strategies that people engage in, ranked in order of importance. It would be difficult.
HEA is a systems-based, rather than a correlative approach. This means that conclusions are drawn from a holistic analysis of livelihoods – that is, taking into account all the means by which people survive, all their resources and all their options – rather than from an analysis which aims to find relationships between selected factors or symptoms such as prices and rates of migration or of wild food collection.
The aim of the baseline enquiry is therefore to build up a logical and comprehensive picture of livelihoods that is amenable to such a systems analysis, and each ‘bit’ of information gathered has to make sense in relation to the rest. In these terms the approach gains rigour from the fact that the information has to ‘add up’ in quantitative, as well as logical, terms.
Source: HEA Trainers' Guide (FEG and SC-UK)
