Livelihoods for Resilience Activity Resilience Strategy

The project aims to contribute significantly to reduced food insecurity and increased resilience for chronically food-insecure households in highland areas of Tigray, Amhara, and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Regions. The project targets 97,900 chronically food-insecure households enrolled in the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) and seeks to enable them to graduate from the PSNP with long-term resilience. The project builds on the evidence and successes of the Graduation with Resilience to Achieve Sustainable Development (GRAD) Project and refines and scales up the successful elements of GRAD while introducing new approaches. The project focuses on resilience, which is at the center of the Livelihoods for Resilience theory of change. This focus is based on the understanding that food-insecure households are operating in a context of increasing risk and uncertainty, and that the gains achieved through project activities will only be sustained if people are able to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to shocks and stresses. The project recognizes that resilience is a cross-cutting issue and identifies key issues for consideration, especially related to climate change, across the different approaches and key activities in order to maximize the contribution to resilience. The project aims to provide the Livelihoods for Resilience technical team and partners with guidance to integrate resilience thinking into all relevant aspects of project implementation. The project's resilience strategy is based on the USAID definition of resilience, which is the ability of people, households, communities, countries, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth. The project aims to build resilience to the range of shocks and stresses that disrupt household activities, including climate-related, economic, social, political, and environmental shocks and stresses. The project's resilience capacities include anticipatory capacity, absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity. Anticipatory capacity is the ability to reduce the impact of shocks through preparedness and planning, while absorptive capacity is the ability to cope with shocks. Adaptive capacity is the ability to make deliberate and planned adjustments in anticipation of or in response to change, and transformative capacity is the ability to transform, in terms of structure and function. The project also addresses climate change adaptation (CCA), which is a process of managing climate risks and adjusting to changes over time. CCA can involve reducing exposure to climate-related hazards, reducing sensitivity to climate risks and changes, and increasing adaptive capacity. The project recognizes that resilience and CCA are closely linked, particularly in a context like Ethiopia where climate-related risks, changes, and uncertainty have a major impact on people's lives and livelihoods. The project will also establish demonstration plots, conduct community feedback, and evaluate the project's impact on household income and food security indicators. The project's learning agenda will incorporate questions related to the resilience approach, and the project will provide guidance to the Livelihoods for Resilience technical team and partners to integrate resilience thinking into all relevant aspects of project implementation.