Livelihood Coping Strategies – Essential Needs (LCS-EN)

Outcome

Impact

% of households by Livelihood Coping Strategies for Essential Needs (LCS-EN) category (no coping, stress, crisis, emergency)

The Livelihood Coping Strategies for Essential Needs (LCS-EN) indicator measures how households cope with insufficient resources to meet essential needs, such as food, healthcare and shelter. It assesses whether households used specific coping strategies in the past 30 days or exhausted them within the past 12 months. Strategies are classified as stress, crisis or emergency according to their potential harm to future livelihoods and wellbeing. LCS-EN indicates livelihood stress and risks to households’ future ability to meet essential needs. It does not directly measure whether those needs are currently met or how well households can recover from shocks.

Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:

 

1) Identify Relevant Livelihood Coping Strategies: Start with WFP's list of livelihood coping strategies for essential needs, available under “List of Strategies” on WFP's LCS-EN resource page. The list provides examples of coping strategies, their definitions and recommended severity classifications. Select those most relevant to the target population.

Contact the Cash Working Group (or possibly other major actors, such as ICRC or respected NGOs) to see if a list of locally relevant livelihood coping strategies is available. If so, review it to ensure the strategies are relevant to the context of your intervention.

If no locally agreed list is available, use focus group discussions with affected people to check the relevance and wording of WFP's strategies. Develop additional strategies only if the standard list does not adequately reflect the context. Ensure that different groups are consulted (for example, women and men, younger and older people, people with disabilities, and marginalised population groups), as coping options and severity may differ across them.

Select ten coping strategies for the final LCS-EN calculation: four stress, three crisis and three emergency strategies. More than ten may be included in exploratory surveys, for example when the relevant strategies are uncertain or the survey covers both urban and rural populations. In such cases, select the final ten for analysis as explained in Step 4. Avoid selecting strategies that overlap or describe essentially the same behaviour.

 

2) Classify the Severity of Each Coping Strategy: Use WFP's recommended severity classifications as a starting point. Coping strategies are classified as Stress, Crisis or Emergency according to their potential harm to future livelihoods and wellbeing. Each has a different severity weight - Stress (weight = 1), Crisis (weight = 2), and Emergency (weight = 3) - based on how much they undermine livelihoods and essential needs. When available, use severity classifications from the WFP or Cash Working Group guidance to ensure standardisation and comparability. If adaptations are needed, involve different population groups and apply the agreed classifications consistently across all surveyed households.

3) Conduct a Household Survey Using a Standardised Questionnaire: Interview a representative sample of households. In each household, interview an adult member who is well informed about the household's resources, essential needs and coping strategies. This does not necessarily have to be the household head. Use WFP's LCS-EN question to ask whether anyone in the household used each selected coping strategy in the past 30 days because they lacked resources to meet essential needs (e.g. food, shelter, education or healthcare). Do not count strategies used as part of normal livelihood activities rather than in response to insufficient resources. Responses should include:

   - Yes (used within the 30-day recall period)

   - No, not necessary

   - No, exhausted (used the coping strategy within the past 12 months but can no longer continue using it)

   - Not applicable (don’t have access to this strategy)

Additionally, for sensitive strategies such as begging, also include the option “Prefer not to answer." Record “Prefer not to answer” as missing, not as “No coping” or “Not applicable”. If missing answers prevent determining a household's highest coping severity, exclude that household from the calculation and report the number excluded.

For households that used or exhausted any coping strategy, WFP recommends also asking: "Which essential needs was your household trying to meet by using these coping strategies?" Record all relevant needs mentioned, such as food, rent, healthcare, education, water, essential household services or debt repayment. Do not read out the answer categories; record the respondent's answers. This follow-up question helps identify which essential needs households were trying to meet by using coping strategies.

 

4) Calculate the Livelihood Coping Strategies for Essential Needs indicator using the following steps:

• First, group the coping strategies based on the severity levels: stress, crisis, and emergency. If more than the required number of strategies were used in the survey, then 1) look at how often each strategy was used, and 2) within each severity group, keep the most prevalent strategies only until you have 4 stress, 3 crisis, and 3 emergency strategies.

• Next, create binary variables for each severity level: A household is classified under a severity category only if it actually relied on the strategy (i.e. the answer is "Yes") or exhausted at least one coping strategy (i.e. the answer is "No, exhausted"). The option "exhausted" is included because it shows that the household already relied on that option recently and has no capacity left there.

• Then, classify each household into no coping, stress, crisis or emergency based on the highest-severity strategy it used or exhausted. In practice, classify a household as Emergency if it used or exhausted at least one emergency strategy; otherwise as Crisis if it used or exhausted a crisis strategy; otherwise as Stress if it used or exhausted a stress strategy; and as No coping if none of the assessed strategies were used or exhausted. This way, every household is counted only once, at the most serious level of livelihood coping they relied on.

5) To determine the indicator’s value, calculate the percentage of households in each coping severity category (no coping, stress, crisis, emergency):

   - For each category, count the number of households classified in that category.

   - Divide this count by the total number of surveyed households with a valid LCS-EN classification.

   - Multiply by 100 to express the result as a percentage.

Disaggregate the data by gender of the head of household, geographical area, population group, wealth, household composition (for example, households with older people, households with members with disabilities, single-caregiver households), displacement status, and other locally relevant vulnerability markers, provided the sample size is sufficient to ensure reliable representation.

1) The reliance on stress strategies indicates a reduced ability to deal with future shocks due to a current reduction in resources or increase in debts. Crisis strategies directly reduce future productivity, including human capital formation. Emergency strategies affect future productivity but are extremely difficult to reverse or more dramatic in nature.

2) Consider reporting additional findings, such as the proportion of households reporting "exhausted" coping strategies, which indicates depleted livelihood assets or options. Also consider reporting the prevalence of individual coping strategies, as the overall LCS-EN category does not show how often a strategy was used or how many strategies of the same severity were applied.

 

3) Regularly review “Not applicable” responses for each coping strategy. A high proportion may indicate that some strategies are not relevant or accessible in the local context, or that households exhausted them more than 12 months ago. Households classified as “no coping” may therefore still struggle to meet their essential needs. Interpret LCS-EN results alongside the Essential Needs indicator, which measures households’ reported ability to meet all their essential needs.

4) Some coping strategies are undertaken by specific household members (for example, withdrawing children from school, sending members to migrate, or begging). Where useful and safe, explore whether coping strategies affect adult women, adult men, girls or boys differently. Avoid asking respondents to identify household members involved in sensitive activities. Use appropriate qualitative methods where needed, and apply the findings to programming.

5) Incorporate qualitative monitoring (for example, repeated focus group discussions with different groups) to understand why coping strategies change over time and how these changes differ across population subgroups.

6) The LCS-EN methodology requires contextual adaptation. For meaningful comparisons across survey rounds, use the same coping strategies and severity weights. Always consult the recommendations provided by relevant coordination groups (e.g., a Cash Working Group) who should lead this process locally.

 

7) Ensure consistent recall period for coping strategies (30 days for “Yes” and 12 months for “Exhausted”) to ensure data comparability. When comparing results over time, collect data during comparable seasons and, where relevant, at similar intervals after assistance distributions. Otherwise, differences may reflect the timing of data collection rather than changes in households' coping.

 

8) The Livelihood Coping Strategies indicator exists in two versions: For essential needs (covered on this page) and for food security (described here). The version for essential needs should be used in Essential Needs Analysis, or whenever the context is broader than food security. The Food Security version should be used when a narrow focus on food security is intended.

 

9) Refer to the full WFP LCS-EN guidance and supporting documents for detailed definitions, example questionnaires, and analysis scripts (see below).

10) Where required by DG ECHO, report the indicator “% of households without crisis and emergency Livelihood Coping Strategies (LCS)”. Calculate this as the combined percentage of households classified as "no coping" or "stress". To select the appropriate LCS version:

• Use LCS-EN (Essential Needs) when the result / indicator is intended to measure coping related to meeting essential needs more broadly (multi-sector basic needs, including but not limited to food).

• Use LCS-FS (Food Security) when the result / indicator is intended to measure coping specifically related to food security outcomes (ability to access food).

Also consider using the following indicators:

• Essential Needs (directly assesses households' reported ability to meet essential needs, complementing the indirect evidence provided by LCS-EN)

• Livelihood Coping Strategies – Food Security (LCS-FS) (alternative version focusing specifically on coping caused by insufficient food or money to purchase food)

• Changes in Household Debt (measures changes in indebtedness among cash assistance recipients, helping assess changes in household financial pressure)

• Food Consumption Score (assesses recent food consumption patterns, complementing livelihood coping findings where food access is an important concern)

Also consider using the following indicators:

• Assistance Delivery (assesses whether assistance is delivered safely, accessibly and accountably, helping identify delivery problems that may contribute to continued negative coping)

• Perception of Equal Opportunities (assesses whether different population groups perceive equal opportunities to benefit from assistance, helping identify potential gender, age and inclusion barriers)