The Livelihood Support Programme (LSP), which ran from 2001 to 2007, was created to support the integration of a sustainable livelihoods perspective in FAO’s work in order to increase its impact on reducing poverty and food insecurity. The programme was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

The LSP, as a people-centred, "livelihoods" approach, aimed to identify and build rural people’s strengths, skills, assets and potentials in order to support them to achieve sustainable livelihoods. The LSP drew on past experiences and on existing best development principles and practices from different cultural contexts and built a particular focus on analyzing factors of resilience and vulnerability for rural people.

The work of the LSP was carried out by eight inter-disciplinary thematic FAO working groups: institutional learning; capacity building in cultural contexts; mainstreaming SLAs; referral and response facility; access to natural resources; participation, policy and local governance; livelihoods diversification and enterprise development; and natural resources conflict management.

The programme achieved:

• Improved methodologies both for livelihoods approaches and for interdisciplinary team work;
• Direct development impact based in methodological field testing;
• Institutional impact through the dissemination and integration of team approaches and methods;
• Increased exchange of people-centred development approaches across departmental lines;
• A greater focus on micro-macro linkages;
• The generation of work-related "cross house" networking linkages which continued outside of and after the LSP; and 
• A strong impact on the fundamental strategies or ways of working of some FAO units, especially Emergencies.