Put Timing Beside the Livelihood Decision
A seasonal calendar helps explain when work, income, essential expenses and hazards coincide. It is a working account of a particular group and period, not a weather forecast or a claim that every household has the same year. Use it to ask when support would be useful and feasible before choosing an activity.
Start with the general needs-assessment guide. This page adds timing and differences between livelihood groups. A calendar does not replace current market information, technical crop advice or a household assessment.
Construct an Entire Fictional Year
All places, groups and conditions below are invented. Cedar Plain planners are considering when to offer adult bookkeeping sessions. Three voluntary discussions involve small vegetable growers, landless agricultural workers and market sellers. The accounts concern a typical recent year; no representative sample or measured income series is supplied. Months refer only to this exercise, not a real country's growing season.
| Period | Growers' Account | Landless Workers' Account | Market Sellers' Account | Expense or Stress Question |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January-March | Land preparation and purchased inputs; little crop-sale income | Intermittent preparation work | Modest regular sales | Input payments and school costs may coincide; who can obtain credit and on what terms? |
| April-June | Planting, weeding and heavy labor demand | Most reported farm work, with delayed payment sometimes mentioned | Sales to workers increase in some accounts | Rain can interrupt travel; do workers receive wages when expenses occur? |
| July-September | Harvest, selling and debt repayment | Harvest work followed by fewer opportunities | More produce available; prices and waste may change | Peak sales are not the same as peak net income after costs and repayment. |
| October-December | Lower field workload; maintenance | Some seek nonfarm work elsewhere | Holiday trade mentioned by one group only | Migration, care duties and market obligations may still prevent attendance. |
The table shows reported patterns, not monthly amounts. Leave an unknown unknown rather than filling empty cells with zero income. Some households combine farming, paid work and selling, so these are analytical groups, not mutually exclusive household counts.
Resolve a Disagreement Instead of Averaging It
Grower representatives describe October as a quiet training period. Landless workers say October is when some leave for work. Sellers say a weekday market session would remove trading time. Those accounts can all be true. A village-wide label such as "low-work season" would conceal the people whose opportunity costs are highest.
The planner records three competing schedule options: an October grower session, a shorter session before migration for workers, and a seller session outside the relevant market hours. Trainers' availability, travel, accessibility and care arrangements remain to be checked. Separate voluntary discussions or another safe method may be needed to hear people excluded from the first meetings, including workers paid irregularly and people with disabilities. Do not recruit children to supply missing household labor information.
Read a Shock Against the Baseline
Suppose a fictional flood blocks the road in August. Mark it as a changed condition on a dated second layer. Ask about produce movement, wages, input access and household coping separately. Moving bookkeeping sessions to August would not restore an impassable road or create buyers. Training may need to wait while responsible responders address urgent access and livelihood needs.
Do not overwrite the typical-year calendar with the shock year and then call the difference a measured loss. The baseline is a recalled account, and the shock's duration and effects are still uncertain. Technical and local evidence is needed for actual response choices.
Preserve a Useful Planning Output
The completed decision note reads: "No common low-cost attendance period is established. The program lead will check the three group-specific windows, trainer capacity and access costs before approving a schedule. Timing evidence does not establish demand for bookkeeping or its likely income effect." Retain the calendar's dates, source groups, disagreements, missing voices and review trigger. Revisit it when weather, migration, employment or market conditions change.
FAO/ILO's Livelihood Assessment Tool-kit, first edition, April 2009, Volume 2, section 4, printed pages 43-47, informs seasonal inquiry. It is a historical disaster-livelihood method, not current local data. The calendar and decision are original fiction. Next, map the value chain when the question concerns where a selling constraint occurs.