Livelihood Coping Strategies Indicator for Essential Needs

The LCS for essential needs can give insight into the underlying factors constraining households’ ability to meet essential needs. Use this indicator if you want to better understand and track the use of coping strategies which impact the livelihoods and dignity of individuals within a household. Resorting to these types of coping mechanisms negatively affects a household’s mid to long-term capacity to generate an income and sustain livelihoods. This in turn means they may be less able to cope when faced with future hardships. While this indicator can be used as a proxy of household ability to meet essential needs, it cannot detect the extent to which households are able to meet their needs and should be analyzed in tandem with other indicators.

How to collect data

• The indicator is based on data from household assessments. The indicator is derived from a series of questions regarding the households’ experiences with livelihood stress and asset depletion to cope with food shortages. To calculate the LCS-EN indicator, you must always include at least 4 stress strategies, 3 crisis strategies and 3 emergency strategies that are most relevant for the context.
• Note that when using this indicator, coping strategies are only applicable if they have been used because there were otherwise insufficient resources available to the household to meet their essential needs.
• Example modules (including syntax and xls forms) for different contexts can be found on WFP’s VAM Resource Centre, including generic (applicable to urban and rural contexts), rural and urban versions. See the link to 'VAM Resource Centre' below.

How to analyse the data

The percentage of households in each of the following categories should be reported:

• No use of livelihood coping strategies for essential needs
• Use of stress livelihood coping strategies for essential needs
• Use of crisis livelihood coping strategies for essential needs
• Use of emergency livelihood coping strategies for essential needs

See link below to WFP's technical guidance note.