In the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) protracted crisis has become the norm as result of recurrent armed conflicts, restricted access to natural resources and markets, and fragile institutional response capacity resulting in the breakdown of livelihoods and a longstanding food access crisis.
The Middle East and North Africa region is living through a particularly turbulent period: 12 countries in the region have witnessed civil unrest or protracted conflict in recent years. Combined with chronic poverty and the threats of natural hazards, the number and size of protracted crises is pushing the humanitarian system far beyond the boundaries of what it was designed to manage. In the past 10 years, funding for humanitarian interventions in the region has increased tenfold (from USD 0.76 Billion to USD 7.63) but remains insufficient to meet growing demand.
The case for investing in resilience has never been stronger as both humanitarian and development interventions need to enhance the absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities of the socioeconomic systems affected by protracted crises. In other words, focusing on resilience can help prevent humanitarian crises as well as provide faster and more sustainable solutions to crises when they occur.
In the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) protracted crisis has become the norm as result of recurrent armed conflicts, restricted access to natural resources and markets, and fragile institutional response capacity resulting in the breakdown of livelihoods and a longstanding food access crisis. From 2014 to 2015 the call for resources under the Strategic Response Plan (SRP) increased from 88 to 538 Million USD with the share required to address food security related needs increasing from less than 30% to almost 60%.
In such a context, the issue is not if we need to invest in resilience, rather it is how to concretely operationalize the concept in programming. On-going efforts are promoting the use of resilience considerations in the formulation of interventions and as an organising framework for joint work and increased mutual accountability among governments, humanitarian and development actors, and donors . However, as resilience cannot be readily observed and can only be measured through modelling, it is more difficult to use it as an indicator of the expected resilience impact of projects.
To bridge this gap, FAO is promoting the use of the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) in the WBGS to understand the factors that make households resilient to shocks and stresses. The analysis uses data from the Socio-economic and Food Security Survey (SEFSec) – collated yearly by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics – to incorporate resilience as a dimension of the estimate of food insecurity with the backing of key Food Security Sector (FSS) partners like UNRWA, WFP and Oxfam.
As RIMA identifies key and context specific determinants of resilience – variables such as assets, income or access to safety nets – and their relative importance (“weights”) in each particular context, it can be used to define a resilience marking system applicable to each project in the SRP. Indeed, while it is not possible to say to what extent a project will increase resilience, it is possible to score the expected impacts of a project on assets, income or access to safety nets and other observable variables; the weight can be used to aggregate the scores into a single ‘resilience marker’.
The Resilience Marking Cycle
This resilience marker should be decided in a participatory project scoring process, ideally by the same SRP panel established for vetting humanitarian projects. The resultant resilience marking informs decision makers about the expected impact of interventions on resilience. The same indicators used for marking can be used for monitoring and evaluating project performance, while information from project evaluations can be used to improve the marking system, highlighting discrepancies between expected and actual project impact on resilience.
Such an approach is being piloted by the FSS in WBGS and promises to help mainstream the resilience focus of programming in the various stages of the humanitarian programme cycle – from identification and formulation to fund allocation and impact monitoring and evaluation both in the WBGS and further afield.
