Indicators of severe drought, flood or conflict should be monitored to identify when conditions have worsened and implement a crisis modifier. Programming should determine the optimal timing, scale, and duration of food and cash transfers to prevent households from turning to negative coping strategies.

Programming should consider expanding access to financial services before and at the start of a shock through village savings and loan associations (VSLAs) or other financial services. Savings groups, such as VSLAs, can build bonding social capital, which is an important household resilience capacity that contributes to well-being outcomes. Bonding social capital can be built through other groups, such as natural resources management committees, pasture management groups, livestock marketing groups, etc.

Programming should expand the kinds of information shared and mechanisms by which they are shared to improve access to information. Particularly important pieces of information that can increase resilience include: market information, climatic information, and information on livestock/crop disease, threats, or epidemics.

Programming should enhance alternative income-generating activities to move people out of shock-prone livelihood strategies (i.e. those most exposed to climate and/or socio-economic shocks including drought, flood, conflict, market fluctuations, etc.), as well as intensify agricultural production.

During the hunger season, income transfers should be considered to enable farmers to bridge food shortages and increase productivity. In conditions of water and fodder shortages that occur during droughts, programs should consider livestock offtakes to prevent livestock disease, with the possibility of farmers buying back livestock when conditions improve. PRIME monitoring reports suggest that protecting livestock from unplanned deaths through fodder and water provision, livestock offtake, and veterinary services can be critical for household resilience. At the same time, income transfers can also provide critical assistance to project participants engaged in off-farm and/or informal sector livelihoods (not necessarily agriculture based).

Comprehensive multi-sectoral programming has helped strengthen household and community resilience capacities to manage drought and reduces the need for households or communities to turn to negative coping strategies.

Evidence shows that direct participation in systems-level interventions (e.g. market system development, natural resource management, improved governance) has a significantly greater influence on household resilience than simple exposure to them at the community level. Programs should consider how various populations can most directly and effectively engage in systems-level interventions.

Programs can incorporate a gender dimension of resilience through women's economic empowerment by creating conditions for the acceptance of women’s participation in decision making, men’s support for women’s health, and reduced gender-based violence and domestic abuse.

The five resilience questions ask: “to what end”, “to what”, “for whom”, “through what”, and “of what”. This resilience lens should be applied when designing financial services programs to ensure they are relevant and accessible to vulnerable groups, available when needed, and accounting for relevant risks. Financial service programs should analyze and understand shocks and stresses to determine how drivers of instability affect different segments of society, including gender, ethnic, or religious groups. They should also analyze and understand vulnerabilities of households, design diversified products for varying resilience needs, determine how to address knowledge, attitude and behaviors that shape financial services use, leverage technology to address the shock and stress context, and address the enabling environment.

Programming should focus on the long-term impacts of shocks and account for downstream effects that continue after the initial shock has dissipated. For example, in Somalia, social conflict and trade disruptions increased after the initial period of drought, suggesting that programming should aim to strengthen social bonds and avoid creating competition.

Data from RISE recurrent monitoring surveys suggest that programming needs to expand beyond a focus on droughts. Programming should also target flood exposed areas and violent extremism during shocks by focusing on conflict mitigation, provision of mental health and psychosocial support services (looking at aspirations and confidence, etc.), and strengthening social resilience capacities. PRIME recurrent monitoring survey data suggest that hazard insurance and disaster risk reduction interventions show promise as protective measures and highlights that health and caring practices (beyond food security) should be considered in resilience programming to protect children’s nutritional status during drought.

RISE recurrent monitoring surveys show that some identified key absorptive capacities that need to be strengthened are bonding social capital, holding of savings through savings groups, access to hazard insurance, and disaster preparedness and mitigation. Key transformative capacities that need to be strengthened are: access to communal natural resources like piped water, access to paved roads, access to schools, veterinary services, and health care, and access to formal safety nets. Adaptive capacities that need strengthening are: diversifying livelihoods, access to financial services, access to information, and investment in human capital.

Programs focused at the nexus of resilience and humanitarian assistance require understanding of systems dynamics relative to the environment and climate change, knowledge of relevant shocks and stresses, and the core resilience capacities needed to deal with them. This implies the need for comprehensive risk and resilience assessment tools. Sustainable CEDRR requires community mobilization and transboundary, cross-sector governance over longer time periods. Regarding adaptive management, ‘investments in operational resilience (awareness, knowledge, skills and risk reduction measures of operations to support diversity, redundancy and continuity of services in the face of shocks and stresses) are critical for integration of CEDRR into humanitarian and development programs to achieve resilience and wellbeing gains.'

Applying a dual-lens approach of gender equity/social inclusion and resilience implies that risk and resilience assessments should incorporate gender and social inclusion (e.g., disaggregated survey data by sex, age and other common exclusion factors) to understand how different individuals experience shocks and stresses. Analysis of the gendered drivers of resilience should be conducted to assess five domains of gender: laws, policies, regulations, and institutional practices; access to and control over assets and resources; roles, responsibilities, and time use; cultural norms and beliefs; and patterns of power and decision-making. Program interventions should focus on strengthening absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities in an inclusive way, and programs should look for synergy/partnership with local organizations that focus on marginalized groups.

Programs should apply a participatory process of identifying, designing, and implementing interventions. Programming should support interventions that support positive interactions across groups to build trust and tolerance. Programs should go beyond strengthening good governance to building intergroup cohesion (horizontal cohesion).

Where appropriate and feasible, programs should utilize a recurrent monitoring system to track household responses to shock exposure over time. This enables programs to adaptively manage and finetune aspects of each program area. Recurrent monitoring surveys (RMS) are panel surveys that follow a sub-sample of households for a year and monitor their responses to shocks and program uptake. RMS can provide detailed real-time information about program utilization in the face of shocks, program timing and sequencing, as well as whether program impacts endure after the program has ended. An additional round of a recurrent monitoring survey should be conducted after the end of the program to determine whether the achieved outcomes continued after the shock and program ended. Compare the continued positive deviant households with households that failed to maintain gains.

Include a qualitative research component in RMS studies. Focus group discussions or key informant interviews can explain changes in social capital, challenges and issues related to livelihoods, information about programs funded by other donors, etc.

Programming should track how collective action, like social groups, increases as members of these groups gain more trust in each other through regular interaction.

A more targeted sampling method could more accurately measure the relationship between programming, household resilience capacity, and well-being outcome variables. Designing a survey sample with both a program [treatment] group and a control group improves the utility of the analysis for adaptive management of resilience programs.