Coping Strategies Index

The Coping Strategies Index (CSI) is a behaviour-based indicator of household food insecurity that counts and weights the consumption-related coping strategies households adopt when they cannot access enough food. Developed by Daniel Maxwell in the 1990s and standardised in the CARE/WFP field manual, it asks how frequently a household resorted to behaviours such as eating less-preferred foods, borrowing food, reducing portion sizes, restricting adult consumption, or skipping meals, and combines frequency with severity into a single score that is quick to collect and well suited to monitoring and early warning.