This note aims at giving Country Offices a framework to reflect on the pros and cons of using the Household Economic Approach (HEA) for targeting or prioritization.
The Household Economic Approach (HEA) is a method of assessing groups of households’ vulnerabilities to economic shocks and changes over large rural areas, based on livelihood patterns and market information.
The HEA can be a useful tool for geographic targeting and/or prioritization when other sources are unavailable or not granular enough.
However, using the HEA for direct household-level targeting, albeit possible, can severely limit WFP capacity to conduct precise, efficient, and scalable targeting processes due to the inherent limitation of a tool design to assess vulnerability qualitatively and at the community level.