Resilient Youth
– Education: All children would be able to complete primary/secondary/tertiary school;
– Water: The whole community would have access to sufficient, good-quality water at all times of the year;
– Peace and security: The whole community would enjoy continual peace and security. Human health, productive livestock herds and farms, access to markets, diversified incomes and roads were also highly rated in many locations. These characteristics come up consistently across different livelihood groups (pastoral, agropastoral and peri-urban) and age and gender groups, irrespective of the number and level of services and interventions provided in the assessment sites.
Developing indicators of resilience
1. Using an overall or universal measure or indicator(s) of resilience, which enables us to understand whether resilience is increasing, decreasing or staying the same. The almost uniform finding that resilient households have multiple sources of income and a strong asset base indicates there is potential for measuring absolute resilience. The findings from the CoBRA assessments confirm the hypothesis underpinning the conceptual framework – that households would define themselves as resilient when they were able to feed their families adequately every day and meet basic needs on a consistent basis both in stressful and ‘normal’ times without external relief. Being able Executive summaryUnderstanding Community Resilienceviiito quantifiably measure this ‘ability to cope’ would then provide a universal indicator of resilience.
2. Using composite and contextually specific indicators of resilience, which enable us to understand how local drivers of resilience are expanding or contracting, and the impact of interventions on those drivers. The four assessments to date have consistently highlighted highly similar household characteristics of resilience. Community characteristics are more varied, but with strong commonalities. Linking these characteristics with quantitative indicators that could be tracked over time is the logical next step for the CoBRA methodology.