HEA and Resilience

HEA baseline data and outcome analysis can be used to measure household resilience and can help to determine whether households can recover sufficiently after a hazard (such as a drought) without using damaging coping strategies. This analysis is used to calculate the ‘household livelihoods resilience score’, a quantified measure of resilience that allows us to compare resilience across different socio-economic groups and geographic areas.

Using this score in combination with project data, it is possible to measure and compare the effects of different projects (whether merely planned or actually implemented) on household resilience and highlight where a project might do unintended harm. This is useful in the project planning cycle, where it is possible to evaluate which of a range projects will most increase household resilience. It can also help in mid-project or end-of-project evaluations to measure the effectiveness of a project in relation to the objective of increasing household resilience.

The video below to the left shows how HEA can be used to measure resilience. The video below to the right discusses the results of a study commissioned by USAID’s Center for Resilience on the economics of resilience. It features FEG’s Mark Lawrence and demonstrates that investing in resilience and a more proactive response to avert humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa could reduce the cost to international donors by 30 percent, while also protecting billions of dollars of income and assets for households and communities impacted by droughts.