Sustainable livelihoods guidance sheets: section 3

This is the third part of a seven part series of Guidance Sheets. This guidance sheet shows how SL approaches can be used in the identification of development priorities and new activities (sections 3.2 and 3.3). These two sections look at issues of programme identification, design and planning. There is a particular focus on the livelihoods analysis aspect at this stage. In practice, this aims to explicitly relate programme outputs to improved livelihood outcomes.

SL approaches can also be usefully applied to reviews of current activities that were not initially designed with SL principles in mind, helping to identify problems such as an undue focus on physical outputs (e.g. trees, roads, wells) or sectoral objectives (e.g. revenues, markets), at the expense of a broader focus on livelihood improvement and poverty reduction (section 3.4). There is no set approach on how to achieve this, but the paper argues that such a review should aim to shed light on:

• the ways in which project/programme activities are directly and indirectly affecting people’s
  livelihoods and the context that shapes them
• whether people’s own livelihood priorities are being addressed
• how people’s livelihood strategies are affecting their participation in and benefit from the project
  or programme
• how activities can be adapted to enhance livelihood impacts for target groups while remaining
  consistent with the overall project purpose.

SL approaches can also be used to sharpen the focus of monitoring and evaluation systems (section 3.5). Monitoring and evaluation, from a livelihoods perspective, looks at how to embrace the SL's people-centred and participatory principles; be holistic by monitoring changes across a wide range of livelihoods priorities; and support a process 'learning' based approach.

The paper concludes looking at the development of logical frameworks (log frames) (section 3.6).  The SL approach and log frames are both tools that can be used to design, manage and evaluate projects. This section shows how a livelihoods analysis helps explain why and in what way people are poor. A log frame translates this diagnosis into action. It summarises how a proposed intervention is expected to achieve a given outcome.