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
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:
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:
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.
Our guest author, Prabhu Pingali, Professor of Applied Economics & Director of the Tata-Cornell Agriculture & Nutrition Initiative at Cornell University, 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.
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.
To warm up for the global conference “Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security” taking place in Ethiopia in a few weeks time, Farming First and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) held a lively and informative Twitter Chat on the topic of “resilience”.
Our expert panelists from IFPRI and Farming First supporter organisations Fintrac and Farm Africa opened the debate by sharing their views on what resilience has to do with agricultural development.
Throughout the chat, panelists and our online audience shared abundant examples of projects already helping to boost the resilience of poor people and communities vulnerable to shocks and stressors such as climate change, conflict and scarce natural resources.
Our active online audience posed a number of interesting and challenging questions to our panelists – from how we can measure resilience – to what “better data” for farmers really means.
The hashtag #2020Resilience will be active all the way up to the “Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security” and beyond, so if your question wasn’t answered this time, be sure to keep an eye out for more discussion and resource exchange.
Poor people and communities are being hit by shocks ranging from droughts, floods, and earthquakes to conflict and food price spikes, and these shocks are putting people’s food and nutrition security at risk.
It’s time to rethink how people and communities can be helped to become more resilient to these shocks. The international conference “Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security“, held by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on 15-17th May will debate just that – and we invite you to be part of the discussion online.
Join experts from Farming First and the IFPRI on Twitter at 10am EDT on Wednesday 16th April to debate the issues with our experts:
Jay Kaufman is Senior Vice President of Field Operations at Fintrac. He has two decades of experience providing support and oversight to multi-year agricultural development projects in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. He is an expert in market analysis and commercial distribution channels; smallholder and local partner grants administration; and agricultural sector rehabilitation post-disaster. @fintrac
Tenna Shitarek is Farm Africa’s Programme Manager for Quality in Ethiopia. Prior to working at Farm Africa Tenna worked as a consultant and he produced a number of important evaluations and reports on a range of topics including economic resilience and disaster risk reduction. He is also the co-author of “The Economics of Early Response and Disaster Resilience: Lessons from Kenya and Ethiopia”@farmafrica
Ruth Meinzen-Dick is Coordinator of the CGIAR program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi). Her research deals with water resource management, land, forests, property rights, collective action, and the impact of agricultural research on poverty. She leads IFPRI’s Gender Task Force and co-leads work on strengthening women’s assets. Much of her research has been in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. @ifpri
Clemens Breisinger is an economist and research fellow at IFPRI’s Development Strategy and Governance Division. Since 2010, Clemens leads the Middle East and North Africa team, which provides knowledge, strengthens capacity and aims at influencing policy and investment decisions for an Arab World free of poverty and malnutrition. @ifpri
Agnes Quisumbing is a senior research fellow at IFPRI and co-leads a research program that examines how closing the gap between men’s and women’s ownership and control of assets may lead to better development outcomes. Her past work at IFPRI analyzed the factors that enable individuals, households, and communities to move out of poverty over the long term, and on how resource allocation within households and families affects the design and outcome of development policies. @ifpri
Tweet us YOUR questions for the experts, using the handle @farmingfirst or @ifpri using the #2020Resilience hashtag!
This week, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) launched its 2013 Global Food Policy Report, reviewing major trends and developments from the past year, and setting an agenda for action for 2014 and beyond.
Whilst post-2015 development discussions are focusing on eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, the report argues that ending hunger and undernutrition by 2025 should be a top priority.
In his opening remarks, Shenggen Fan, Director-General of IFPRI commented: “In 2013, global food prices have been calm and stable. But there is no room for complacency”. He added that the prices of food and vegetables in emerging countries such as India and China are rising, compromising the nutrition levels of these populations. “The SDGs are gaining traction, but there is lack of consensus on agriculture, food and nutrition. We need to be precise. We need to be ambitious,” he asserted.
The full report discusses what can be done to achieve the ambitious goal of ending hunger and malnutrition by 2025. Action points outlined by IFPRI include:
Read the full 2013 Global Food Policy Report from IFPRI here.