ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a different quantitative approach for characterizing livelihoods and assessing potential wide-scale impact of interventions that complements detailed household modelling. It considers how results inform intervention strategy, and how use of this approach has catalyzed the development of advanced data collection tools and associated analysis software that enhances the utility of the method. The methodology can be considered an 'inverse' of the typical approach of applying complex household modelling to a limited number of household types. Two example studies explore the utility of this approach to household analysis. Both studies focus on 'food availability' (FA) as a component of the broader and more complex concept of food security and encompass large geographic areas with diverse agroecological and socioeconomic characteristics. Though using similar FA indicators at the household level, the studies applied the indicators differently. A sensitivity analysis tested the effect of two categories of agricultural productivity interventions alongside an off-farm intervention.
