Bosco Ogwang Lira District, Uganda


“If children cannot eat enough food, it can be stressful to attend daily classes, study, and concentrate. The current food scarcity in the region will affect children’s concentration in school and could, if it continues, lead to a higher dropout rate from school.”


The Pastoralist Livelihoods Initiative is a tightly focused resilience- building program that switches between relief and development, rath- er than trying to address both at the same time, as the Productive Safe- ty Net Program does. It offers one clear practical way to address the disconnect between relief and development activities. But while safe- ty-net programs have been widely researched all over the world, more experimentation, learning, and evaluation are required for these kinds of switching programs.


Measuring Resilience With mounting interest in resilience as a conceptual framework comes increased demand for empirical knowledge of resilience. Govern- ments, nongovernmental organizations, international donors, and oth- ers are interested in using the best available indicators and survey instruments to identify differences across space and time and to diag- nose sources of vulnerability and design programs to address weak- nesses. To diagnose the problems and develop the best responses, it is important to measure resilience by gauging the impacts of both shocks and the mitigating influences on these shocks, such as cop- ing behaviors and outside interventions (Frankenberger and Nelson 2013). In short, good measurement should drive diagnosis and response (Barrett 2010). A better understanding of resilience will require collecting


Maïga Mahamane Employee of Welthungerhilfe, Mali


“In 2012 we were beset by several crises: a nutrition security crisis, a politics and security crisis, and at the same time a humanitarian crisis. It was the first time we in Mali had to endure such a time of instability. Civil servants abandoned their offices, and the people in occupied areas had no one to turn to for help....”


“To prepare for the future, one has to consider that Mali is located in the Sahel, which is affected


by climate change. The majority of the population depends on the wet season to ensure their food security. To improve their situation, they must pursue long-term activities to improve their pro- duction systems, to equip them with the necessary information, and to diversify their diet.”


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data on the causes and consequences of a wide range of negative shocks. However, resilience, vulnerability, and coping behaviors are difficult phenomena to measure, because (1) shocks, by definition, are often short-term unpredictable events, implying the need for frequent data (for example, bi-monthly); (2) negative shocks often occur in remote places and populations, such as pastoralists in the Sahel or the Horn of Africa; and (3) resilience to shocks involves com- plex coping or adaptive behaviors, which are diverse and may involve thresholds and qualitative shifts. As such, the unpredictable nature of shocks and responses


to them makes measuring vulnerability and resilience much more dif- ficult than measuring chronic welfare measures like poverty, child malnutrition, or infant mortality. For chronic measures, occasional snapshots from household surveys usually suffice to paint a general picture of poverty across regions and countries and to determine basic trends. These standard household surveys are not frequent enough, however, to assess the consequences of shocks except by coincidence, and large panel surveys in developing countries are still relatively rare. While many standard economic or health and nutri- tion surveys might measure important aspects of vulnerability and resilience, they are unlikely to measure all relevant behavioral responses. This suggests that measuring vulnerability and resilience requires a different approach.


Understanding Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security | Chapter 03 | 2013 Global Hunger Index


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