Recovering from severe drought in the drylands of Ethiopia: Impact of Comprehensive Resilience Programming

Abstract

Developing-country households are facing an increasingly challenging set of shocks—including climate, economic, political, and health shocks—that in combination present a novel threat to their livelihoods and well-being, and thus to international development progress. There is a growing need to strengthen the evidence base for interventions and programming approaches that bolster households’ resilience to such shocks. In response, this paper documents an impact evaluation of the USAID-funded “Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement and Market Expansion” (PRIME) project implemented from 2012 to 2017 in one of the most shock-prone areas of the world, the drylands of Ethiopia. The project’s overall goal was to reduce poverty and hunger by enhancing households’ ability to recover from recurring climate shocks and their downstream economic impacts. As it were, soon after its inception, the drylands were hit by an exceptionally harsh and prolonged shock, a series of multiple, back-to-back, severe droughts.The droughts led to a sharp drop in households’ well-being, measured here by their food security. Using Difference-in-Difference Propensity Score Matching (DID-PSM) in one of the first causal resilience evaluations, this paper demonstrates that, nevertheless, the project's resilience-strengthening interventions had a positive impact on their ability to recover, slowing the decline in food security considerably. Delving deeper into how this impact was achieved, the paper finds that two programming approaches optimized resilience impacts. First, “Comprehensive Resilience Programming”, whereby interventions spanning multiple sectors were implemented simultaneously in the same geographical areas, made a major difference. Second, while interventions were mainly implemented at a systems-level (e.g., establishing veterinary pharmacies), many households made the decision to actively participate in them. The paper finds that the impact on their resilience was far greater when they did so. The lessons for future resilience projects are that (1) greater impacts can be achieved by taking advantage of the synergies induced when interventions are layered cross-sectorally, and (2) projects with systems-level interventions should pro-actively plan for the direct participation of households so they can take full advantage of their benefits and thereby achieve greater resilience to shocks. The paper also offers some lessons for future resilience impact evaluations.