Introduction

The Household Economy Analysis (HEA) Database serves as a pivotal resource in the assessment and understanding of household economies across various regions. Its creation and ongoing management enable a structured approach to data storage and presentation of the livelihood strategies and other characteristics of households within diverse livelihood zones.

One of the important opportunities presented by the HEA Database is its ability to standardize the language and classification used across the range of baseline surveys and the resulting Baseline Storage Sheets (BSS) for each country. This standardization plays a crucial role in enhancing the comparability and coherence of data, which, in turn, is instrumental in:

• Ensuring Consistency: By adopting international standards and a uniform set of terminologies for metadata, the database ensures that data collected from different regions or studies can be compared and analyzed in a consistent manner. This consistency is fundamental for aggregating data at a national or regional level, thereby providing a comprehensive overview of livelihood strategies.

• Facilitating Cross-Regional Analysis: Standardization of language and classification across BSS allows for the direct comparison of data across different countries and regions. This comparative analysis is essential for identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies in household economies.

• Improving Data Quality and Reliability: Standardized data storage and classification methodologies contribute to the overall quality and reliability of the data stored in the HEA Database. This reliability is critical for stakeholders, researchers, and policymakers who depend on accurate and comparable data to make informed decisions.

• Enhancing Accessibility: A standardized language and classification system make the database more accessible to a broader audience, including international agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and researchers unfamiliar with local terminologies. This accessibility is pivotal for collaborative efforts and knowledge sharing on a global scale.

• Enabling Data Integration: The use of global metadata standards, such as ISO 3166 for countries, ISO 4217 for currencies, and the Central Product Classification (CPC) v2.1 for products, allow current data for items such as market prices and crop year forecasts to be compared to the data for the reference year, easing the use of HEA data in outcome analysis.

Loading new Baseline Storage Sheets (BSS) into  the database requires the import to recognize the data in the various worksheets and allocate the correct standard metadata. Data that cannot be recognized automatically because it uses different terminology or different cell locations to the norm must be reconciled manually, requiring an additional level of effort.

This document contains recommendations for data entry in a BSS that ensure that it will be easy to load into the HEA Baseline Database.

Guidelines

Livelihood Strategies (Data, Data2, Data3)

Metadata should only be in Column A

Don’t put metadata (data that describes the livelihood strategy in the per-community columns (i.e. column B onwards). The reported income or kcals for each community are used to produce a reconciled value for the Livelihood Zone, and so the numbers for each community must be referring to the same Livelihood Strategy. For example, if the strategy refers to a particular type of food, then it should be in the label in Column A, and not in that row in Column.  

For example, the following data:

Should properly be entered as:

Notice that “termites” has been moved from the community cells (B9 and D9) to the label in A10.