Measuring Resilience

Facilitator: Tim Frankenberger, President, Tango International

Presented by: Jon Kurtz, Director for Research and Learning Mercy Corps;  David Leege, Deputy Director, Program Quality Support Department, Catholic Relief Services;  John Russell, Senior Advisor, Agriculture and Environment , World Vision

A major milestone in achieving resilience at a significant scale will be the ability to measure resilience outcomes at the household, community and national levels. Importantly for policy, programming and resource procurement, the development of robust measures of resilience will also enable evaluation of the effectiveness of various initiatives specifically aimed at enhancing resilience to food security shocks. While several ongoing efforts show considerable potential for enhancing the resilience of vulnerable populations, to-date few measures have been put in place to provide objective, verifiable information on the outcomes and impact of such efforts. The continuous, complex and dynamic process of building resilience makes it inherently difficult to measure. Nonetheless, such information is critical for assessing the relative potential of different approaches to building resilience in the face of recurrent shocks. This concurrent session presented the efforts and proposed approaches of World Vision, Mercy Corps and CRS in their attempts to measure resilience outcomes