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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 Africa
Katie 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

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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

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8Matching outcomes and indicators

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10M&E: Impact Pathways

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11Approach to M&E