HEA Livelihood Zone Datasets for the Sahel, 2011-2018: Rural profiles for climate and livelihoods research

About: This dataset consists of Household Economy Approach (HEA) Livelihood Zone (LZ) information for Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, and Chad. Each LZ entry includes a list of crops grown in the zone (with crop calendars) and an HEA breakdown including wealth groups; main sources of food income, main sources of cash-income, and main items of expenditure where available.

What this is: The excel spreadsheets provide an analysis of the main sources of rural income including crop and livestock types, disaggregated by ‘Livelihood Zone’, for Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Chad. The livelihood zone maps were created over the past two decades by the USAID Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET).  The standardised Household Economy Approach (HEA) protocol was used to define LZs in all cases. A LZ is a rural agro-ecological-economic area from which households derive their livelihoods.

Why it’s useful: Livelihood zones  provide information on the primary livelihoods/sources of income of a defined geographical area. This includes the principal characteristics of production systems, topography, vegetation and other natural resources.  Seasonal calendars provide information on the cycle of agricultural activities. Information is also provided on market access, types and frequency of natural disasters/risks, and household response strategies. LZ boundaries can be verified periodically to identify any changes that may have taken place in crops grown, seasonal labour and crop calendars etc, thus providing the information needed to both model the impact of potential climatic changes on  rural economy and livelihoods, and to ground truth information from remote sensing/EO sources.

Source rule: All countries are compiled from USAID FEWS NET Livelihood Zone Descriptions (LZDs)(zone identity, crops, calendars, livelihood hazards).

Primary sources
USAID FEWS NET Livelihood Zone (LZ) data