Livelihood Coping Strategies Module: Contextualization recommendations and lessons learned

Over the past 10 years, FEWS NET and members of the IPC Partnership have encountered numerous challenges in collecting and analyzing household-level survey data in order to analyze livelihood change for the purpose of conducting IPC and IPC-compatible acute food insecurity analysis. Starting in 2021, FEWS NET began testing an approach to modify collection of WFP’s Livelihood Coping Strategies module in order to improve the availability of locally relevant livelihood coping data for use in AFI analysis in Somalia. While the specific adaptations for the Somalia context have technical significance, the broader value of this activity was to identify a replicable approach to adaptation that is practical and rigorous in many geographies. 

The guidance provided here is based on that pilot work and is intended to do three things. First, it offers survey implementors an explanation of the process FEWS NET undertook to adapt WFP’s Livelihood Coping Strategies (LCS) module, as one way to guide adaptations in other contexts. This guidance does not insist that it provides the only way this module may be adapted successfully for the same purpose. Moreover, this guidance does not insist that WFP or any other implementor must change their approach to collection of the LCS module if it is useful for their own purposes. Instead, this guidance seeks to offer how the adaptations have been developed based on FEWS NET’s concern that livelihood coping strategies data often fail to be adequately relevant for the local contexts in which they are collected and seeks to suggest improvements to better achieve that goal. The second purpose of this document is to offer guidance that is both technically rigorous and practical in terms of implementation. In particular, this guidance attempts to balance the need for surveys better suited for the contexts in which they are implemented, with the programmatic reality that survey data may be collected in a large number of areas with their own particular livelihoods context. This guidance attempts to avoid over-simplifying livelihoods while avoiding a process so intensive that it becomes infeasible to implement. Finally, this document makes recommendations about (1) specific LCS adaptations to consider in the Somalia context, (2) specific LCS adaptations for which further refinement or testing should be considered, and (3) select issues not addressed in this pilot work that deserve future research.