IFPRI 2020 Policy Consultation and Conference, Side Event on Measuring and Evaluating Resilience in Drylands of East Africa,

Addis Ababa, 15-17 May 2014

A review of existing analytical frameworks, metrics and outcomes designed to measure enhanced

resilience in the Horn of AfricaKatie Downie, Sabrina Chesterman and Lance Robinson

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• Review of some of the current efforts towards developing metrics and frameworks to measure the the resilience of populations

• Most use food security as an outcome or as a proxy for resilience

• This paper will look at why this is not optimal and discuss briefly other efforts ongoing, including the work the Technical Consortium is engaging in with the NDMA on developing M&E frameworks and developing decision analysis models for better targeting of investments

Paper outline

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Governments in the Horn of Africa need to be able to attribute the impact of investments in the Country Programme Papers towards enhanced resilience:

• Lack of rationale to determine prioritization of investments

• Lack of appropriate baseline data to populate indicators to measure significant change / transformation

• Lack of indicators aligned with country-specific investments to measure impact on populations

• Lack of relevant time series panel datasets to review responses to shocks

Background – In what context is the Technical Consortium working

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Resilience is defined as a capacity that ensures stressors and shocks do not have long-lasting

adverse development consequences and enables support to trajectories enhancing growth and

prosperity.

Defining resilience

5Recommendations derived from Analyses of Current Approaches to Resilience

• Distinguish determinants of resilience from resilience outcomes

• Keep the approach simple - the array of categories may be numerous, but the number of indicators in each category should remain few (except where such data is already been consistently collected).

• All approaches have merit, what needs to be evaluated is the applicability of the different facets of different approaches in an operational context, ie. Kenya EDE MTP

• Key aspect of the analysis will be using indicators of resilience outcomes for impact assessment and for testing of hypotheses around determinants of resilience – ie. Testing the application of hypotheses from work of RM-TWG

• Measurement must take place at multiple levels ie., Household unit and systems dynamics

• Ensuring that resilience measurement is pro-poor – system resilience is not in itself a pro-poor context

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• Working with governments in the Horn of Africa to provide technical assistance to support the development of investment plans and projects which aim to enhance resilience or “End Drought Emergencies” (Kenya Country Programme Paper)

• Intensive engagement with the National Drought Management Authority in Kenya (focal point for implementation of Country Programme Papers)

• Chair of the technical sub-group in the Knowledge Management Cluster - assisting with decision support analysis for better targeting of investments, research on decision analysis with respect to appropriate investments and building a robust M&E system, including indicators, data needs and impact outcomes.

What is the Technical Consortium doing?

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• An application in the context of the NDMA Ending Drought Emergencies Medium Term Plan

• Assisting with the development of resilient pathways, focusing on the causal relationship between investment and impact; which indicators to use, how to continuously validate that relationship and how to measure the impact of the investment on the anticipated outcome

• At present, modeling impact in terms of standard sustainable development indicators ie. HDI, MDG>SDG (health, education, nutrition, living standards etc)

Our Approach to Resilience

8Matching outcomes and indicators

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10M&E: Impact Pathways

11Approach to M&E