Seasonal Food Availability Calendar

The MAHFP produces a numeric, comparable measure of how many months households had adequate food and a population seasonality profile, but it does not explain why shortages occur. The seasonal calendar is qualitative and participatory: it maps, in the community's own terms, how rainfall, harvests, stocks, prices, labor, and hunger move together across the year, revealing the causes and lived experience of the lean season. The two are complementary — the calendar supplies the explanation and local detail that contextualize the MAHFP's numbers.

A core PRA principle, in Chambers's words, is to 'hand over the stick' — to let local people analyze their own reality. Community members hold detailed knowledge of their seasonal cycle that an outside enumerator lacks, and constructing the calendar themselves both yields richer, more accurate content and builds shared understanding and ownership. Visual, stone-based scoring also includes non-literate participants. The facilitator's role is to enable and probe, not to dictate the categories or fill in the diagram.

Through triangulation, another central PRA principle. The same calendar is built with different subgroups — for example separate women's and men's groups or different wealth groups — whose results are compared, since seasonality is often experienced differently across them. The calendar is then cross-checked against secondary data such as rainfall and price records and against quantitative indicators. Convergence across sources increases confidence, while discrepancies are explored rather than ignored, guarding against any single group's biases distorting the picture.