A new paper, co-authored by Itad’s David Wilson, argues that resilience interventions can bring positive change in the lives of target populations but the positive effects are often too small or diluted to create transformational change – at least over such a short time period.
The article, which was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, evaluated the effects of a 3-year resilience intervention in Niger as part of the DFID-funded Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme. The SUR1M project demonstrated how households were better able to handle climate shocks and stressors by strengthening their ability to engage in positive coping strategies; however, the majority of these strategies could only have a positive effect in the medium to long term and the higher level of resilience of beneficiaries did not translate into a clear positive impact on their well-being.
The evaluation, which was structured around the project’s theory of change, considered the following three elements: the types of responses beneficiaries adopt when faced with adverse events; their ability to recover from those events; and the long-term impact on their well-being, measured through their level of food security.
BRACED was launched in 2015 and built the resilience of over 7 million vulnerable people to climate extremes and disasters in different parts of the world, with a focus on the Sahel. The SUR1M project (Scaling-Up Resilience to Climate Extremes for over 1 Million People in the Niger River Basin) was one of the resilience projects contributing to the BRACED effort. Its aim was to strengthen the resilience of the Niger River Basin population to climate extremes.
Read the full paper.
Find out more about the SUR1M project.
Read about our work on BRACED.
