Photo Credit Goes Here GRAD - Graduation with Resilience to Achieve Sustainable Development What Resilience has meant for us

U.S. GOVERNMENT PARTNERS

Designed in 2011, GRAD didn’t apply a resilience framework or have resilience as a higher objective. (Despite having resilience in the name and often being referred to as one of USAID’s resilience projects) Goals: Graduate XX households from the government safety net Increase household income by YY

GRAD RESULT 1: HH ECONOMIC GROWTH 1.Village Economic and Social Associations (w/ VSLA) 2.Income Generating Activities (mostly women with VESA loans) 3.Value Chain Development (Livestock, Pulses, Malt Barley, Vegetables, Honey) using MFI Credit 4.Input Supply, Improved Production Techniques, Market Linkages

GRAD RESULT 2: “RESILIENCE”?? 1.Women’s empowerment and gender equality 2.Climate change adaptation 2.Improved nutrition for women and children 3.Aspiration to graduation 4.Crisis modifiers

GRAD RESULT 3: LEARNING AND SHARING 1.Embedded in PSNP and intended to help build their capacity and improve performance. 2.Working with civil society, financial institutions and the private sector with same aims Before the drought, conditions were good and many GRAD HHs were seeing dramatic gains. Not much attention paid to resilience.

1.General drought impacts in GRAD areas: food shortages/malnutrition, distress asset sales, loss of jobs and out-migration, loss of water points, kids withdrawn from school. 2.Effects on GRAD activities/outcomes: decreased income from most sources, lower savings rates, loan defaults, market linkages constrained, adoption of e.g. gardens and poultry stopped. 3.GRAD HHs clearly more resilient? Why? The VESA with social capital, social fund, savings, and small loans Greater participation of women in household economy (e.g. when men are absent) Diversified income sources (including of different risk profiles) Drought tolerant commercial activities, e.g. irrigated vegetables, shoat fattening. Links with external markets (where functional) HOUSEHOLD RESILIENCE STUDY 04-16

If households are somewhat more resilient, how about the institutional actors that they depend on? PSNP4 did not significantly adjust its program to help with drought mitigation Micro-finance institutions stopped lending and would/could not offer flexibility or rescheduling Private sector actors did not adjust to drought conditions and do not have the flexibility to do so, e.g. agro-dealers with all capital wrapped up in inappropriate products. Crisis modifier slow RESILIENT MARKETS – 02-16

FINAL THOUGHTS 1.GRAD ticks a lot of the boxes in the USAID resilience framework (even though that framework was not used during the design) 2.Resilience however can’t be put in a box, e.g. Result 2, but rather should be the basis for the whole project design 3.GRAD has somehow stumbled upon a set of interventions that improve HH resilience. Need to bring that into focus and measure it better. 4.Work needed on improving institutional and market resilience. 5.Still not comfortable that there is a concise set of quantitative indicators that will allow more definitive conclusions.