By Elena Serfilippi | Resilience Research
Why we need resilience metrics
Our limited understanding of resilience diminishes the potential to design smarter programs and measure progress appropriately. We thus lose important ways to help families and communities cope. To understand resilience and learn global best practices, we need to be informed by functional knowledge that serves to effectively guide the systematic design, development, and evaluation of projects over time – and to inform policy. This requires a system of metrics – relevant, reliable, and robust – through which to understand the impacts, adjust investments, and evaluate what constitutes best practice in different contexts. However, a key challenge lies in establishing practical, realistic and low-cost ways to measure resilience.
Our vision is an actionable and science-based resilience measurement system, designed to be an ongoing and shared learning tool that serves to improve and enhance the resilience of farmers and communities, strengthening their capacities to absorb shocks and stresses, adapt to a changing climate, and even flourish in terms of their household and community well-being.
Planned work in Nicaragua presents a practical opportunity to advance our knowledge of resilience metrics, and to share that learning back to the community.
Project update
Until recently Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, had an economy that was moving along and a degree of peace. The political and economic unrest that emerged last April, however, now serves as an ongoing backdrop as we look toward the assessment work we have planned for the Jinotega region in the second quarter of this year.
Current expectations are for this project to commence by June, barring any further turmoil that would increase security risks. The farmer survey will include the resilience questions that will help us to further build and refine the resilience index, and provide new data from which we can see changes in resilience over time – what we call critical resilience hotspots – that may have emerged since the 2017 survey. A resilience index helps us to better communicate resilience key metrics.
Community-level resilience indicators, and associated survey questions will also be developed and refined for checking the critical community challenges and needs.
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