Types of Activities

CARE identifies three categories of livelihood activity appropriate at different points in the relief-development spectrum:

Livelihood Promotion

(improving the resilience of households)
These include programmes that focus on savings and credits, crop diversification and marketing, reproductive health, institutional development, personal empowerment and community involvement in service delivery activities. Most livelihood promotion activities are longer-term development projects that increasingly involve participatory methodologies and an empowerment philosophy.

Livelihood Protection

(helping prevent a decline in household livelihood security)
These include programmes that focus on early warning systems, cash or food for work, seeds and tools, health education and flood prevention.

Livelihood Provisioning

This includes directly providing food, water, shelter and other essentials, most often in emergency situations.

(Carney et al. 1999)

Look at the graphic in the right-hand column:

These activity categories are non-exclusive. That means that a good livelihood promotion strategy is one that has a "protection" element. This should deal with existing areas of vulnerability and help to ensure that any improvements in livelihood security are protected fro re-erosion. Elements of "protection" and "promotion" should be built in as early as possible to "traditional relief" (provisioning) strategies.

Three focus areas of activity cross-cut these categories described above:

• Personal empowerment: interventions that focus on expanding human capacity and hence the overall resource (assets) and income base of the poor;
• Social empowerment: interventions such as education, community mobilisation and political advocacy;
• Service delivery: expanding access to basic services for the poor.

Look at the short example in the right-hand column: