• Livelihoods data help FEWS NET anticipate food crises by showing how households typically access food and income and how shocks like drought and conflict affect their ability to meet basic needs.
• This blog highlights FEWS NET’s core livelihoods products and services, including the forthcoming Livelihoods Explorer platform designed to make livelihoods data more accessible and interactive.
• New livelihood baseline data are available for all 34 livelihood zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with expanded public access through the FEWS NET Data Explorer.

In a drought-stricken village where harvests have failed, a farmer empties their savings to feed their family. Thousands of miles away, a herder sells their last goat for cash because grain prices doubled in recent months. 

Every day, households around the world make critical decisions like these to secure food and income, with survival hanging in the balance. Once the savings are gone and the last goat has been sold, there is nothing left but hunger.

Understanding livelihoods – the ways people typically secure food, income, and other basic needs – helps programs like the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) anticipate how households will cope when inevitable shocks like droughts, floods, conflict, and market spikes strike. 

Documenting the dynamics of diverse livelihood systems helps FEWS NET paint a realistic picture of how people survive, both in good times and bad.

Once livelihoods data have been gathered during national fieldwork operations, FEWS NET applies the Household Economy Analysis (HEA) approach to answer three key questions:

• How do households normally live?

  This helps to establish a baseline of how households in a specific livelihood zone access food and income in a typical year. This includes sources of food (own production, purchases, livestock products, wild foods, etc.) and sources of income (crop sales, livestock sales, labor, petty trade, remittances). 

• How much do they need? 

  Answering this allows analysts to calculate minimum food and non-food requirements, including staple food needs, essential expenditures (such as water, health, education), and the costs required to protect a household’s ability to earn a living (like investing in seeds, fertilizers, or veterinary care for livestock). 

• How do households cope when a shock occurs? 

  Evaluating this question helps to model the impact of hazards – like droughts, floods, conflicts, or price spikes – on household food and income sources. For example, a drought will have more severe impacts on households that depend on rain-fed crops for sustenance than on households that primarily rely on fishing for food and income. Analysts then assess whether households can meet their basic needs using typical coping strategies, or whether they will face food shortages.

“Household Economy Analysis is designed to provide a clear and accurate picture of household economies across wealth groups and geographies,” Harp said. “In practice, it is a rigorous, multi-step process founded in primary research that relies on strong stakeholder networks, expert data collectors, and the willingness of community representatives to share their experiences.” 

FEWS NET uses these livelihoods data in its scenario development process – alongside a wide range of other data on market systems, cross-border trade, conflict, weather hazards, and more – to warn of impending food crises months before they unfold.

New livelihood baselines for the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Livelihoods data are vital to FEWS NET’s food security analysis for countries around the world, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where escalating conflict displaced thousands of people in early 2026. 

For the first time, FEWS NET has collected and analyzed foundational information in all 34 livelihood zones across the DRC, helping to strengthen analyses of how households will cope with ongoing and future shocks.

“Food insecurity in the DRC is multifaceted and influenced by historical, political, economic, and environmental factors,” Harp said. “FEWS NET’s new DRC Livelihood Zone Baseline Profiles include coverage of areas experiencing prolonged armed conflict and economic instability. By revising outdated livelihoods data, this report helps to ensure that future food security analysis is rooted in current context."

In addition to using these data in its own analyses, FEWS NET makes them available to other users through the FEWS NET Data Explorer (FDE), which features the world’s largest publicly available food security data repository with more than 22 million data points as of early 2026.

In this blog, we will provide you with a comprehensive overview of FEWS NET’s livelihoods data products, including a walkthrough of how to access and download these data. But before we jump into the FDE, let’s take a look at the suite of products that bring FEWS NET’s livelihoods data analysis to life. 

Putting data into context: Your guide to FEWS NET’s livelihoods products

To turn livelihoods data into actionable insights, FEWS NET organizes its livelihoods knowledge base into several core products. Each one acts as a different lens, helping analysts understand not just if a community is at risk, but how they are likely to respond to a shock. 

• Livelihood Zone Maps: These maps divide a country into livelihood zones where people generally share the same options for obtaining food, earning money, and trading goods. By understanding these distinct zones, FEWS NET can predict how a shock may ripple across a region. For instance, a drought might devastate a cattle-herding zone while leaving a nearby coastal fishing hub relatively untouched. View the updated DRC Livelihood Zone Map. 
• Livelihood Baselines: FEWS NET’s Livelihoods Baselines provide a comprehensive overview of how people survive in a normal year. By offering a quantitative breakdown of where people get their food and how they balance their budget, these baselines provide the context needed to measure the potential impacts of a crisis. 
• Fact Sheets: FEWS NET’s livelihoods fact sheets provide high-level summaries for each zone, translating complex data into the most relevant information. Explore the DRC Livelihood Zone Fact Sheets.

Ready to learn more? Visit FEWS NET’s Livelihoods page to access our current livelihoods products, along with historical data resources.

Discover FEWS NET’s livelihood zone data

In addition to data-backed livelihoods products, raw livelihood zone data are also available via the FDE.

To access these data, navigate to the FDE and sign in via the prompt that appears on the page. If you are a new user, click Create an Account. You will be asked to enter an email address and create a username and password. 

Logging in will bring you to the FDE’s homepage. Look for the list of data domain dropdowns in the left-hand navigation bar and click on Spatial to access FEWS NET’s geospatial data.

Once on the spatial data page, use the Document type dropdown and search box to select or search for Livelihood Zone Boundaries. 

This filter will pull up FEWS NET’s data for over 1,600 livelihood zones covering 38 countries from 2005 until the present day. For the purposes of this exercise, we are interested in downloading raw livelihoods data gathered from Mali in 2024. 

To begin, search for Mali using the Country dropdown. Next, we will use the Results valid on date search box to search for data from January 2024. 

Once the search results have loaded, you will see two items populate below. The first result is what we are looking for: Mali FEWS NET LHZ Units starting on 2024-01-01. Select the first dataset and scroll down to find an interactive livelihood zone map and a section to customize your data download. 

These geospatial data are downloadable in various formats, including GEOJSON, Flat HTML, KML, and more. To select your preferred file format, click on the dropdown arrow on the right-hand side of the green box labeled Download Flat CSV.

Finally, once you have selected your preferred file format, click the green download button to save this dataset. The FDE also offers an auto-generated API link if you wish to extract this dataset in applications like Jupyter Notebook. 

All of these data are also accessible and available for download on FEWS NET’s Livelihood Zones data page. To download FEWS NET’s entire livelihood zone data collection as a compressed zipfile, click the prompt at the top of the page labeled Download all Livelihood Zones data. 

If you are looking for a particular dataset, scroll down the page to the Search Livelihood Zone data section to filter your search by date range and geographic area. 

Scaling the impact: What’s next for FEWS NET’s livelihoods data

Now that we have explored the depth of FEWS NET’s livelihoods data resources, let’s take a look at the innovation that lies ahead. As the global food security landscape continues to evolve, so do the tools we use to understand it. The FEWS NET Livelihoods Explorer is currently in development. It serves as a groundbreaking public platform designed to house FEWS NET’s entire collection of livelihoods data in one place. 

The Livelihood Explorer’s user-friendly design offers new features that will transform the way food security experts, researchers, and humanitarian planners interact with these data. 

By bridging the gap between raw numbers and actionable insights, the Livelihoods Explorer empowers users with: 

• Advanced data filters: Isolate data with advanced search options. Users can filter by location, livelihood zone, wealth group, livelihood strategies, or specific FEWS NET product types to find the information they are looking for in just a few clicks.
• Interactive visualizations: Numbers tell a story, but visuals make them resonate. Users will be able to visualize data with interactive livelihood zone maps and summary charts that make complex information easy to understand. 
• Comparative insights: Understanding the present requires a clear view of the past. Users will be able to track shifts in livelihood patterns with side-by-side comparisons of historical data against the latest insights. 

FEWS NET plans to launch its Livelihoods Explorer in the near future, marking a major milestone in making global livelihoods data more accessible and interactive than ever before.

“Livelihoods data matter because they represent real people looking for ways to support their family and community,” Harp said. “Investing in updated, accurate, livelihoods data to inform food security analysis and early warning systems can mean real lives saved and real crises averted.” 

Register for an FDE account to access FEWS NET’s wealth of data for use in your own work. 

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