At WCS we understand how important local people are to our conservation efforts. They are our strongest constituency for conservation because their livelihoods are dependent on the wildlife and natural resources that we are striving to conserve.

Increasingly, as performance-based, market-financed incentives for conservation are being tested and scaled-up within WCS landscapes and seascapes, we are monitoring and evaluating the impact of our conservation efforts on local livelihoods.  

A promising approach to livelihoods monitoring that has been piloted successfully in Asia, Africa and Latin America is the modified Basic Necessities Survey (BNS) – an easy to use, locally relevant measure of human welfare that is comparable to UN and World Bank poverty indicators.  

The UN defines poverty as a lack of basic necessities.  The modified BNS uses a locally selected list of goods and services that are identified as basic necessities if 50% or more of local households consider them to be something that every household should have and no households should live without.  Any household surveyed that does not have access to a good or service on the “basic necessity list” is considered poor. 

As the BNS index saturates for all families that own all basic necessities we modified the tool to include an assessment of the value of all owned assets in the BNS list.  This not only allows us to differentiate households that lie at or above the local poverty line it allows us to compare our results with national “standard basket of assets” surveys such as those conducted by the World Bank, the FAO, and DFID.  Implementing the modified BNS is relatively simple, inexpensive and generates livelihood data that is a credible as the gold standard implement by the World Bank’s Livings Standards Measurement Study.