Resilience Tool

The resilience tool provides a framework for understanding the most effective combination of short and long term strategies for lifting families out of cycles of poverty and hunger. It is based on the principle that the factors that make households resilient to food security shocks must first be understood, and then strengthened.

The resilience framework looks at the root causes of household vulnerability instead of trying to predict how well households will cope with future crises or disasters. It also considers how household food security links to the entire food system.

Factors that make households resilient to food security shocks and stresses include:

• income and access to food; 
• assets such as land and livestock; 
• social safety nets such as food assistance and social security; 
• access to basic services such as water, health care, electricity, etc.; 
• households’ adaptive capacity which is linked to education and diversity of income sources; and 
• the stability of all these factors over time.

These factors are combined into an index which gives an overall quantitative “resilience score”. The score clearly shows where investments need to be made to further build resilience. By using this quantitative approach, decision makers can objectively target their actions and measure their results over time.