Over the last decade, resilience has continued to be elevated as an analytic, programmatic, and organizing concept in development discourse and practice. In line with this, approaches to measuring resilience have proliferated, giving rise to a nascent evidence base on both the impact of resilience programming and the sources of resilience that explain why some households, communities, systems, and countries fare better in the face of shocks and stresses than others. Despite clear progress, significant challenges and gaps in resilience measurement and evidence remain. The demand for resilience evidence has also grown exponentially as conflict, Covid-19 and the accelerating impacts of climate change have reversed development gains on a massive scale and pushed hundreds of millions of people into crisis levels of poverty and hunger.

On May 17-18th 2022, the University of Arizona, the Global Resilience Partnership, and the United States Agency for International Development convened a group of 50 experts and development practitioners at the University of Arizona, DC Center for Collaboration and Outreach in Washington, D.C. with the aim of advancing resilience measurement and setting a common agenda for addressing these challenges and gaps. The group of experts and development practitioners included representatives from USAID, the State Department’s Special Envoy for Climate, UN agencies, the World Bank, private foundations, universities, and research institutions, NGOs, and governments and regional institutions, including the Government of Kenya and the Sahelian West Africa Permanent Committee for Drought Control.

Source: US Agency for International Development