18 RESILIENCE PROGRAMMING AMONG NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
As part of the effort to enhance community resilience,
the Secure Africa’s Future initiative is piloting innovative funding mechanisms. These include a shift from small, short-term grants to large, long-term grants; a shift from limited grant funding to unlimited investment funding; and a transition from a philanthropic-giver orientation to a strategic-investor orientation (Folkema and Fontaine 2011). The basic components of the proactive fundraising process include a commitment to be accountable to and encourage participation of both beneficiaries and funding partners.
MEASUREMENT ISSUES Resilience measurement
Despite the numerous challenges encountered in develop- ing robust, accurate, and contextually appropriate measures of community and household resilience, donors and policy- makers have been supportive of such efforts. Tis support reflects the importance of M&E for demonstrating impact and ensuring accountability. To date, NGOs and their research partners have proposed a number of approaches for measuring resilience (Frankenberger and Nelson 2013). Given that many NGOs work with vulnerable populations in predominantly agricultural or pastoral societies, many of their measurement models focus on shocks and stresses that directly affect food and nutrition systems. At the same time, efforts are being made to expand the scope of resil- ience measurement to account for different contexts and other forms of risk (Mitchell 2013). For example, Oxfam has developed methods for measuring resilience regardless of the nature of the shock by specifying particular charac- teristics of a system (such as a household or community) that are assumed to be associated with coping or adaptation success. Likewise, ACCR promotes an approach to resil- ience measurement that is consistent with its Local Adap- tive Capacity Framework (ACCR 2012), which identifies specific elements related to adaptive capacity. As part of the USAID-funded Resilience and Economic Growth in the Arid Lands project in northern Kenya, the consulting group Kimetrica is measuring resilience as a function of income and expenditure outcomes. Te organization Save the Children is using household economy analysis to model resilience and compare costs of different response scenarios in pastoral areas of Ethiopia and Kenya. Mercy Corps sup-
ports an approach to resilience measurement in the Horn of Africa that accounts for the impact of conflict on vulnerable communities and the role of improved market access and value chain participation in promoting resilience.
Analysis of Resilience Measures: Assessing the Effectiveness of Shock-response Dynamics
A framework for resilience measurement is introduced here as a way to focus the discussion of NGO measure- ment practices. Te ability to measure the relationship represented by resilience (that is, the relationship be- tween shocks, responses, and future states of well-being) depends on the analysis of a number of substantive dimensions and structural features. Substantive features highlight the specific indicators considered and data collected so that insights related to resilience dynamics can be measured. Structural and methodological fea- tures highlight the way in which data will be collected. Table 1 presents a summary of three substantive features and three structural-methodological features important for resilience measurement. As noted in Table 1, substantive features comprise initial-
and end-state measures, disturbance measures, and capacity measures. Structural-methodological features introduce questions about the scale, timing, and types of measure- ment employed to measure resilience. For each set of fea- tures (that is, substantive and structural-methodological), a number of dimensions and examples are introduced. Te combination of substantive and structural-methodological features provides a framework of questions that may be used to analyze the collection of practices and technical properties associated with resilience measurement.7 Rather than provide a critique of individual measures used by specific NGOs, the approach used here is to comment on dominant paterns of practice in resilience measurement across NGOs and to recommend areas where general prac- tices can be improved. Te set of substantive and structural- methodological questions introduced in Table 1 will be used to frame this discussion.
• Initial- and subsequent-state measures: Te domi- nant practice in resilience measurement is to collect data on outcomes of interest and on program-related factors
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