Comparison of FAO and TANGO Measures of Household Resilience Capacity

Measuring households’ resilience and the determinants of such resilience, or “resilience capacities,” has become an urgent task as households across the globe face an increasingly challenging set of shocks, including climate, economic and geo-political shocks. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Technical Assistance to NGOs, International (TANGO) have gained extensive experience providing measurement support to resilience-strengthening programs implemented in developing countries.

This paper explores similarities and differences between FAO’s and TANGO’s measurement approaches. The organizations employ the same procedure for measuring resilience itself, both using an indicator of “realized resilience”, which compares households’ food security before and after specific, well-defined shocks. However, the procedures used to calculate indexes of resilience capacity, which in contrast measure households’ intrinsic capacity to withstand shocks they may face in the future, differ.