Ask Ag About...Measuring Resilience

Information: 

Join this month’s Ask Ag discussion in the comments area below to ask questions and share your own experiences with measuring resilience in a meaningful way.

Measurement is a key consideration for any development program, including those funded by USAID. It is, after all, one of the Core Operational Principles of USAID's Policy Framework.  Resilience activities are no exception.

This month's Ask Ag discussion will consider how such a complex and context-specific issue as resilience is measured. Agrilinks has assembled a panel of M&E experts who are struggling with this very issue for a variety of donors, implementing organizations and learning institutions:

Tiffany Griffin is the Lead Adviser on Resilience Monitoring, Evaluation and Strategic Analysis for the USAID Center for Resilience, which leads the agency's efforts to better integrate resilience into development programs.

Lam Huynh, an M&E Capacity Building Fellow at USAID, will apply the "field lens" to your questions based on his experience coordinating a baseline impact evaluation on resilience in the Sahel.

Joanna Upton has extensive experience researching food assistance policy in sub-Saharan Africa and its impact on local farmers and communities. Her recent postdoctoral work on resilience includes a paper that applies a resilience framework to the measurement of food security, which she co-authored with Chris Barrett and Jennifer Cissé.

Marco d’Errico will share his experience authoring the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA), the FAO approach to measuring household resilience to food insecurity. He and his team measured resilience in almost 20 countries for the analysis.

Jon Kurtz has worked with international NGOs and UN agencies to improve the impact of programming around livelihood, food security and disaster resilience. He currently serves as Mercy Corps’ Director for Research and Learning, where he leads the agency’s program research and impact evaluation efforts.

Some guiding questions include:

• What are the primary metrics USAID and other donors are using to determine farmer capacities for resilience? What makes these metrics different from other metrics for resiliency?

• Are there existing tools that implementing partners can use to collect data on resiliency metrics?

• What tools does your project use for collecting information on the outcomes of interventions on resilience?