Fishing communities are often recognised as being amongst the poorest in developing countries, and interventions targeted at improving resource status seen as central in the fight against poverty. A series of field assessments focusing on vulnerability conducted in two communities in Mali and Nigeria revealed some counterintuitive results. Despite fishing being the primary livelihood, vulnerabilities relating directly to the state of the resource were ranked lower than those relating to basic human needs. Those results challenge the conventional view and suggest that non-sectoral interventions can have more effective impacts on the livelihood of those communities than interventions targeting the resources.