What Really Matters for Resilience? Exploratory Evidence on the Determinants of Resilience to Food Security Shocks in Southern Somalia

The renewed commitment among humanitarian and development actors to strengthening resilience of populations and regions experiencing recurrent crisis is much welcomed. However, the evidence base for informing resilience programming remains woefully thin. Of the multiple frameworks that have been developed to clarify the concept of resilience1, few provide insights into what needs to be done differently to enhance it. As a result of the conceptual ambiguity and lack of evidence, nearly any intervention can currently be re-labeled as “resilience building”. If the major investments to strengthen resilience are to be most effective, they must be informed by more rigorous and critical analysis of what contributes to resilience, for whom, and to what?

Mercy Corps, in partnership with TANGO International and other agencies, is working to generate this understanding through program research and evaluation. This research brief presents findings on resilience to food security shocks in Southern Somalia. The study set out to empirically test commonly held assumptions about which characteristics, capacities, and conditions were most strongly linked to household resilience in the face of Somalia’s complex political, ecological, and humanitarian crisis in 2010-2011. The results provide unique insights into a critical policy question: What specific set of factors, if reinforced, are most likely to strengthen households’ resilience to major food security shocks in Southern Somalia and similar contexts?