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As part of our ongoing series that explores the state of the negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals, we asked Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Sivan Yosef, and Laura Zseleczky of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to explain why smallholder farmers should be a key consideration at the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, which is taking place in Sendai, Japan, this week.
As delegates gather today for the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, we hope that building up the resilience of smallholder farmers remains a key theme of their vital discussions. Incorporating the experience of farmers engaged in all aspects of agriculture into the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction can go a long way in building up the resilience of the majority of the world’s poor and vulnerable people, and creating a global food system that is sustainable, healthy, and resilient to disasters and other shocks. Continue reading →
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What role can the private sector play in boosting the resilience of smallholder farmers in the developing world?
Lystra Antoine, Director of Agriculture for Dupont Pioneer, met with Farming First to explain the ways in which the company is contributing to the food and nutrition security of smallholder, by disseminating their science-based technologies, such as hybrid seed. Continue reading →
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Farming First TV interviewed Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Head of 2020 Initiative at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to uncover what the concept of resilience really means.
“We are currently spending a lot of resources on coping with shocks.” Pandya-Lorch commented. “Can we spend resources that allow you to build up your capacity to anticipate shocks? It’s a question of where are the resources best spent?” Continue reading →
An acre is about the size of a football pitch. That might seem like a lot, but if your livelihood depends on it, it is rather small. In a good year, (that is with good seed, fertilizer and rain) a farmer can yield about 3 tons of maize on one acre. You might wonder why the 500 million or so smallholder farmers worldwide, who by definition farm on less than five acres (two hectares), farm at all. But my recent trip to Bungoma, Kenya, proved that there are ways these small farmers can be supported to build more robust livelihoods. The Montpellier Panel, Growth with Resilience report, for example, makes the case that people can be resilient with support for women and youth, diversified incomes and better nutrition.
FOCUS ON RURAL WOMEN AND YOUTH
We talked to Fumona, a single mother and grandmother. Over 30 percent of rural households in Kenya are headed by women, and focusing support on rural women proves to have a positive impact on health, nutrition and education levels for the rest of the family, thus contributing to more resilient communities. Funoma has been receiving credit, inputs, training and insurance from NGO One Acre Fund. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9byUyq5g9nU Fumona planted more than just maize this year as an outbreak of Maize Lethal Necrosis Disease (MLND) could have destroyed her entire crop. Instead, with advice from One Acre Fund she divided her acre between finger millet, maize, beans and groundnuts. She ended up with an astounding seven bags of finger millet (about 70 kg) from planting just a quarter-acre, or in other words, more than enough to feed her family and leftovers to sell.
DIVERSIFY LIVELIHOODS
Farmers situated near Kisumu in a small village called Siaya such as Timothy Okoth, his wife Jennifer and their 5 children, weren’t as lucky. With just a few goats and a couple of chickens milling about the village, it was clear that these farmers have very little to fall back on if the rains are too short or their crops are damaged by pest or disease. Last year they faced severe drought and only produced 6 bags of maize that simply was not enough for the 7 of them. Diversity is key to resilience as an entire livelihood can be wiped out if you are reliant solely on one crop. When and where these options don’t exist, safety nets can catch your fall and help you to bounce back more quickly. Even though drought ravaged Timothy and Jennifer’s crops, they were relieved to be One Acre Fund members. In addition to their package of seeds and fertilizer, they also bought an insurance policy. The insurance pay-out turned out to be a very smart investment indeed; enabling them to stay on their feet in hopes of better rains to come.
SCALE UP NUTRITION
40 percent of children under five in sub-Saharan Africa are stunted. Adequate nutrition not only prevents irreversible damage to physical and mental abilities, but helps children become more resilient in the face of disease. To that end, the farmers we visited in Siaya are learning how to build a nursery for sukumu seedlings, a nutrient-rich kale variety. The sukumu will not only help to provide essential vitamins and minerals, but also a potential source of income. They hope that One Acre Fund will also help them access seeds for onions and tomatoes to eventually sell in their local markets. So can you survive on one acre or less? It’s not easy, but it is doable, especially when there is good weather. And when there’s not, one hopes that more farmers will have the access to and choose to participate in programmes like One Acre Fund. Resilience for farmers on an acre or less might still require cattle and kale, but making a wise investment never hurts either.
This blog article is part of an ongoing series on resilience being published ahead of an upcoming IFPRI conference to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May 2014. Building resilience means helping people, communities, countries, and global institutions prevent, anticipate, prepare for, cope with, and recover from shocks, not only helping them to “bounce back” but also to become better off. This conference aims to help set priorities for building resilience, to evaluate emerging threats to resilience, and to draw lessons from humanitarian and development responses to previous shocks.
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Our guest author, Jon Kurtz, Director for Research and Learning for Mercy Corps,continues our series of blog articles on resilience published in partnership with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) ahead of the conference “Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security” 15-17 May 2014.
Resilience has an Achilles’ heel: By being all things, it risks being nothing new.
Resilience casts such a wide net that nearly any intervention – from disaster risk reduction to cash transfers to good governance – can be repackaged and deemed as resilience building.
As the concept matures, we must identify with greater precision what makes a difference to resilience – and, equally importantly, what does not. If we cannot begin to make these distinctions, the political support for resilience will wither on the vine. And agencies will continue to struggle with how to translate resilience into improved practice on the ground.
METHODS FOR MEASUREMENT
An essential first step is getting the metrics and methods for measuring resilience right. No single set of indicators will adequately capture resilience – the concept is simply too diverse.
Instead, the Resilience Measurement Technical Working Group– comprised of experts from multiple agencies, including Mercy Corps – has proposed a broad measurement framework. This framework aims to be general enough to apply in different contexts, while adhering to basic principles essential for measuring resilience.
According to the framework, resilience should be analyzed:
As a set of capacities such as livelihood opportunities, access to essential services, or others presumed to be linked with more successful coping or adaptation to risk
In relation to risks and shocks such as droughts, conflict, or food-price spikes – including assessment of the magnitude and levels of exposure to disturbances.
Against development outcomes such as food security, health or poverty. Measures for these should be captured both before and after a disturbance.
This approach is a step forward. Bringing together these measurements and analyzing how they relate to each other can hone our understanding of resilience. Specifically, it tells us how certain capacities mitigate the effects of specific shocks or stressors on households or communities’ wellbeing.
THE FRAMEWORK IN ACTION
Mercy Corps is actively applying this measurement approach, most recently in a study in Southern Somalia. In that context, we tested common assumptions about what contributed to resilience to the complex crisis resulting in the famine of 2010-2011.
Here is what we learned about the factors that helped families cope with or bounce back after the shock:
Women’s participation matters: Women who were more empowered over decisions in their homes had the confidence to negotiate with local authorities to gain access to essential services, like health clinics and markets – and thus better able to feed and care for their children.
Extended social networks underpin resilience: During the crisis, families with broader social and economic relationships – particularly those that crossed clan lines – maintained or more quickly regained food security afterward.
Livelihood diversity is not enough: To build resilience, we can’t simply work to increase the number of income sources people have. Instead, we must promote independent income sources that are not all prone to the same types of risks.
Mercy Corps is using the same research methodology in areas of the Philippines affected by Typhoon Haiyan where we are supporting economic recovery programs. We are testing our assumptions about the roles of financial literacy and inclusion – such as having and knowing how to use formal savings accounts and loans – in supporting resilience to natural disasters. Stay tuned for results in July 2014.
Studies like these are moving us in the right direction, away from intuition and guesswork towards evidence-based programming. For instance, based on our research, Mercy Corps’ programs in Somalia now place greater emphasis on strengthening the forms of social capital people utilize to cope with severe shocks.
GUIDING POLICYMAKERS FOR INVESTMENTS IN RESILIENCE
Looking ahead, our aim is to produce knowledge that policy makers can use to make informed decisions about major resilience investments. This will require applying compatible methods for measuring resilience across agencies and geographies.
There are several collaborations underway to do just this. Among them is the Resilience Learning Consortium, which is currently planning joint studies to fill key knowledge gaps, such as on the links between gender equality, risk and resilience in the Horn and Sahel.
Honing our understanding of resilience carries certain risks. Rigorous analysis will undoubtedly show that some factors or interventions are less vital to resilience in certain contexts. The results may erode support for resilience in some quarters that feel excluded from the big tent.
Yet the goal of research is not popularity but clarity – and in the case of resilience, also to protect its Achilles’ heel.
This blog article is part of an ongoing series on resilience being published ahead of an upcoming IFPRI conference to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May 2014. Building resilience means helping people, communities, countries, and global institutions prevent, anticipate, prepare for, cope with, and recover from shocks, not only helping them to “bounce back” but also to become better off. This conference aims to help set priorities for building resilience, to evaluate emerging threats to resilience, and to draw lessons from humanitarian and development responses to previous shocks.
Women’s Self-Help Groups (SHGs) are becoming ubiquitous across rural India. There are currently around 3 million registered women’s SHGs in the country. These groups are becoming integral to the lasting resilience of its rural food systems and communities, and can provide some useful lessons for the rest of the developing world.
Initially set up for facilitating microfinance, SHGs are now playing an important role as conduits of overall empowerment of rural women in India, giving women the strength to create change that they could not have been able to achieve individually, in terms of access to finance, environmental stewardship, and even political empowerment.
WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN ACTION
This year I have visited many groups that demonstrated the impact women’s SHGs are having on building a resilient community. In Gufu for example, a village located a few hours outside of Ranchi, Jharkand, we visited an SHG that was helping women break their dependence on local moneylenders and stop selling valuable assets (often land) when they needed access to credit. It began life as a savings and loans group and is now operating a cooperative store selling seed and fertilizer and has helped its members purchase irrigation pumps for their land.
The leader of an SHG in Kunti, a neighboring area to Gufu, told us proudly, “We now have a bank account and I go to the bank to manage the account. I never went into a bank before I started with this group. I always thought banks were for people with money. We have money now.” This new sense of confidence has women increasing their participation in village-level meetings and talking about their aspirations to run for local government offices.
In Jharkand we visited PRADAN, an NGO that has a long track record of working with women’s groups. PRADAN was helping one rural community improve the supply of water to its drinking water wells by changing the way it uses land on the upper watershed. The women in the community participated in mapping the watershed, in making decisions on cropping pattern changes, and in implementing the change. Today perennials have replaced annual crops in the upper watershed, soil erosion has reduced significantly and well water is available throughout the year, even during the peak summer months.
NOT ALL SELF HELP GROUPS ARE SUCCESSFUL
The evolution of SHGs from savings and loans groups to become an access point for political decisionmaking and natural resource management is truly astounding – but not all groups are able to step up to taking on the broader development and local governance challenges. So what makes an SHG flounder or flourish?
Many of the groups we visited lacked leadership or managerial skills, or exhibited poor group cohesion. In many cases, the leaders were overburdened by numerous and competing demands from the various development projects that are trying to use the SHGs for accomplishing their objectives. All too often, external organizations, eager to see change, have elected to channel projects through SHGs. They are perhaps unaware of how the splintering of limited time and resources of SHG women might undermine the capacity for SHGs to manage their own affairs, a fundamental dimension for change.
FOCUS ON GROUP BUY-IN AND OWNERSHIP
Institutions, donors, and organizations looking to leverage the power and potential of SHGs should be optimistic, but keep in mind the ultimate goal of enhancing women’s empowerment and opportunity. Individual ”buy-in” and group ownership of decisions are vital to ensuring that SHGs are a platform to facilitate transformative change that will build a more resilient community.
As development agencies, researchers, or practitioners, we need to proceed with caution so as not to undermine the potential of SHGs. Equipping SHGs with the financial and managerial resources they need to meet goals determined by the group and forgoing projects that could highlight the differences amongst women (educated versus non-educated, young versus old) will remain critical principles of practice.
Certainly, it will require a more nuanced view of SHGs, one that looks at them as organizations on a pathway to determining their own future rather than simply vehicles for project implementation that can provide heartwarming stories about women.
This blog article is part of an ongoing series on resilience being published ahead of an upcoming IFPRI conference to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May 2014. Building resilience means helping people, communities, countries, and global institutions prevent, anticipate, prepare for, cope with, and recover from shocks, not only helping them to “bounce back” but also to become better off. This conference aims to help set priorities for building resilience, to evaluate emerging threats to resilience, and to draw lessons from humanitarian and development responses to previous shocks.
