FEG modelled household chronic and emergency needs using HEA over a 10-year period (2008-18) for a project looking at the economics of resilience to drought and cost-benefit analysis of interventions in Mauritania for the World Bank. Seven out of nine rural livelihood zones in Mauritania were included in the analysis, covering 89% of the rural population.

The objective was to evaluate different interventions by modelling their effects on chronic and emergency needs. Two types of intervention were included in the modelling:

Intervention 1: The existing safety net, which in 2019 consisted of $168 per household per year.

Intervention 2: The existing safety net plus a resilience-building intervention that provided in total the equivalent of 1.5 times the safety net ($252 per household per year).

The results showed the total number of people facing a deficit, by year, after each intervention was implemented (i.e. the number of people requiring an emergency intervention, over and above the safety net). The overall conclusion was that these two interventions went a long way towards covering needs in non-crisis years, but they covered a much smaller percentage of total needs in a crisis year.