Compare methods

	Rural Livelihood Diversification Index	Seasonal Food Availability Calendar
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	1994
Originator	Frank Ellis (rural livelihoods framework)	Robert Chambers (Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition)
Type	Descriptive concentration/diversity index pipeline for income sources	Participatory visual mapping of seasonal variation in food and livelihoods
Seminal source	Ellis, F. (2000). Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780198296966	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953-969.
Aliases	Livelihood Diversification Index, Income Diversification Index, Simpson Index of Income Diversification, Herfindahl Diversification Measure	Seasonal Calendar, Participatory Seasonal Calendar, Seasonality Mapping, Food Availability Calendar
Related	3	3
Summary	A rural livelihood diversification index summarises, in a single number, how spread out a household's income is across different sources and activities — farming, off-farm wage labour, self-employment, remittances, transfers — rather than concentrated in one. Grounded in Frank Ellis's rural livelihoods framework, which defines diversification as the process by which rural households construct an increasingly diverse portfolio of activities to survive and improve their living standards, the index borrows concentration measures such as the Herfindahl and its Simpson complement from ecology and industrial economics. A household relying wholly on one crop scores as undiversified and exposed; one drawing evenly on many sources scores as highly diversified and, often, more resilient.	The Seasonal Food Availability Calendar is a participatory field method, rooted in Robert Chambers's Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), in which community members themselves construct a visual chart of how food, livelihoods, and stresses vary across the year. Along a time axis of months or local seasons, participants map the timing and relative intensity of rainfall, planting and harvests, food stocks, market prices, labor demand, hunger, and illness, often using stones, beans, or marks to score each period. The resulting calendar makes the community's lean season visible and explains its drivers — when harvests run out, prices spike, work disappears, and hunger peaks. It is valued for surfacing local knowledge about seasonality that surveys taken at one point in time cannot capture.