Seasonal Food Availability Calendar

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.