Experts gather for a BRACC resilience learning event

Malawi is one of the world’s poorest and least resilient countries. Entrenched poverty is exacerbated by natural resource degradation and frequent climate shocks. Funded by DFID, a consortium of NGOs and UN agencies is working under the Building Resilience and Adapting to Climate Change in Malawi (BRACC) programme to strengthen resilience of poor and vulnerable households to withstand current and future weather- and climate-related shocks and stresses in four districts in southern Malawi (Figure 1). IFPRI has been responsible for the impact evaluation design and baseline survey for BRACC.

More than 65 representatives of implementing partners, government ministries and other actors working on resilience gathered for a one-and-a-half-day event on February 11 and 12 at Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe, to explore the outcomes of the recently completed baseline survey for BRACC and to discuss the way forward for the impact evaluation and related learnings.

In his opening remarks, Roger Heath, DFID Malawi’s growth and resilience team leader, highlighted the importance of BRACC as DFID’s flagship programme to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable households to climate change in Malawi. Heath highlighted the importance of generating learning about what works and what does not to help strengthen systems and shape better resilience and social protection policies.

In the first session Daniel Gilligan, Deputy Division Director of IFPRI’s Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division, presented the BRACC impact evaluation design, which aims to identify the causal impact of access to the BRACC programme on poverty, resilience, and household food security. The BRACC impact evaluation will use a sequential, mixed method randomized control design. The quantitative sample consists of 3,136 households in 224 villages in Balaka and Phalombe districts. The design assigned 149 villages to a treatment and 75 to a control arm. Gilligan highlighted that following the soon to be published National Resilience Strategy, BRACC targets three groups of beneficiary households: (1) hanging in (maintaining asset levels; lowest socio-economic status); (2) stepping up (invest in assets and activities to improve livelihoods, increase income); and (3) stepping out (accumulate assets to foster new livelihood activities with higher returns). In addition, Gilligan provided some insights on the survey instruments, enumeration team, trainings, and baseline survey data collection.

IFPRI Malawi’s Associate Research Fellow Jan Duchoslav then presented the key findings of the BRACC baseline survey, conducted between August and October 2019: Sample households have 4.5 members on average, with a mean household dependency ratio of 1.2, indicating that there are on average 1.2 non-working-age household members for every working-age member. The average household head is 41.5 years old. 36.3 percent of household heads are female, and 80.7 percent of household heads received at least some formal education. 65.1 percent of household heads are in a monogamous marriage and further 5.2 percent are in a polygamous marriage. The average household in the sample holds MWK 1.1 million worth of durable assets, and 22.1 percent of households have access to formal or informal financial services in the form of a bank account or membership in a village savings and loans group. Most of the sampled households are highly exposed to climate-related shocks. Over the 5 years prior to the baseline survey, they faced on average 3.8 instances of drought or irregular rains and 1.6 instances of flooding. Moreover, 16.2 percent of households experienced a shock in the 30 days prior to the baseline survey. Only 26.4 percent of households can satisfy their nutritional needs in terms of energy intake, and even fewer in terms of intake of most micronutrients. 53.8 percent of households in the sample have a sufficient Food Consumption Score (FCS).

Afterwards, Blessings Chida, M&E officer at WFP Malawi, provided an overview of the WFP resilience monitoring results in Chikwawa and Mangochi districts. The WFP sample shows similar characteristics. Sampled households have 4.3 to 5.6 members on average and the average household head is 44 years old. 28 percent of household heads are female. 67 percent of household heads attended primary school, 12 percent secondary school, and 21 percent never attended school. Most farmers in the WFP sample produce maize with a low proportion of households producing more than 300kg. Casual labor (ganyu) remains the major source of income. 7 percent of households have a poor FCS. There are more female-headed households (12 percent) with a poor FCS than male-headed households (4 percent). Blessings concluded his presentation with providing insights on the livelihood coping strategy index, the household expenditure share as well as the consolidated approach for reporting indicators of food security (CARI).

In their presentation, IFPRI Malawi’s Research Analysts Edwin Kenamu and Jack Thunde focused on the issue of measuring resilience. Thunde said that resilience looks at a systems’ or individuals’ ability to withstand shocks or ‘bounce back’ after a negative shock. While resilience itself cannot be measured directly, Kenamu described, there is a range of proxy indicators that can tell us a lot about resilience, which can be calculated from the BRACC baseline data. Such indicators measure shocks, coping strategies, food security, and other determinants.

Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program then presented on “Lessons on resilience building from Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme.” He concluded his presentation with five key messages:

1. A large social protection programme can be operated in a poor country;
2. Commitment by government and development partners is indispensable;
3. Independent, rigorous, and regular evaluation during implementation is vital;
4. Genuine dialogue, learning and redesign is essential; and
5. Complementarities can be leveraged while addressing emergency, enhancing resilience, and promoting development.

In discussion groups, facilitated by Louis Solomon (GOAL), Stern Kita (DoDMA), Olex Kamowa (FEWSNET), Grace Kumchulesi (Titukulane), Tom Mtenje (Titukulane), and Panji Harawa (United Purpose), participants discussed the challenges of building resilience in face of climate change, recurrent humanitarian assistance, food price shocks, population growth, fragmented social safety nets, and water scarcity.

The second day of the learning event began with a presentation by Julie Ideh, Country Representative at CRS Malawi, who described the Measuring Indicators for Resilience Analysis (MIRA) tool. MIRA is a data collection and analysis scheme developed with Cornell University to measure and predict resilience among households prone to food insecurity. The MIRA project was first developed and implemented in the context of the United in Building and Advancing Life Expectations (UBALE) program, a program that serves three districts in Malawi – Chikwawa, Nsanje, and Rural Blantyre. It has also been rolled out in the Grand Sud in Madagascar in July 2018. “MIRA data allows to develop a model using machine learning algorithms, predicting the future incidence of food insecurity,” Ideh explained. The survey instruments have two key components: (1) a baseline/endline survey that covers both household and community characteristics, and (2) a short high-frequency survey tool, designed to track shocks and food security outcomes, along with a few other key variables that are likely to change rapidly over time. Ideh highlighted the data dashboard, which provides an accessible and effective method for monitoring conditions in the survey villages. Community leaders in Malawi showed a keen interest in access to the data, principally as a tool to communicate the community’s challenges to NGOs and to both local and national government authorities.

Then, IFPRI Malawi’s Associate Research Fellow Jan Duchoslav presented on the mechanism experiments that are and may be implemented during BRACC. Mechanism experiments manipulate aspects of an intervention to verify/quantify particular mechanisms in the theory of change. As two-third of BRACC households will receive the intervention package, there is scope for several mechanism experiments within BRACC (Figure 2), which can generate learning during the implementation of the program. For example, the impact of different pricing models on take-up of a funeral and health insurance package offered by the rural microfinance company CUMO is currently being tested in BRACC villages.

Kenan Kalagho, Principal Agricultural Gender Roles Extension Support Services Officer at the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development then presented on possible follow-up qualitative investigations for BRACC. Kalagho highlighted that qualitative approaches, such as focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and life histories are equally important to understand how, why and what motivates people to behave in a particular way.

Olivia Chilora, MEAL coordinator at GOAL Malawi, presented GOAL’s Resilience of Communities to Disasters (ARC-D) toolkit. The toolkit has been tested and rolled-out in 11 countries. In Malawi, the toolkit has been piloted in Nsanje, Mangochi, Machinga, and Balaka districts. Drawing on work by Dr. John Twigg and concepts of the Sendai framework, it aims to assess the level of disaster resilience at community level through a discussion-based survey of 30 disaster resilience components, which span around four thematic areas: (1) community understanding of disaster risks; (2) strengthening governance to manage disaster risks; (3) reducing vulnerability for resilience; and (4) enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response and to “build back better” in recovery. The toolkit is easy to administer, with a duration of three to five hours after the context analysis, highlights contributory factors to community resilience, and can be used to measure impact or compare different contexts.

In a roundtable discussion, facilitated by Tamani Nkhono-Mvula, panelists reflected on the key resilience learning points from the last one-and-a-half days, and the priorities for evaluation, learning and knowledge in the next phases of BRACC. The panelists included Christina Connolly, Climate and Environment Adviser, DFID Malawi; Sarah Kohnstamm, BRACC Coordinator WFP; Daniel Gilligan, IFPRI; and Chris Connelly, PROSPER Consortium Director. Key takeaways include:

• Measuring resilience is a complex issue but BRACC presents a unique data rich opportunity to develop context specific measures for Malawi.
• There exist huge opportunities for learning during the BRACC programme as long as the impact evaluation design is adhered to.
• How can the combined value of the BRACC baseline survey, WFP’s resilience monitoring, MIRA, and other surveys be maximized?
• The complementarities between the different components of BRACC should be exploited because BRACC is a truly transformative programme.

In his closing remarks, IFPRI Malawi program leader Bob Baulch summarized the wealth of contributions of the event and highlighted the need to mix quantitative with qualitative approaches. Referring to the McNamara fallacy, he said that “We must make what is important count, not make what we can count important.”

Concluding the event, Christina Connolly from DFID said that it is “great to have a high-quality impact evaluation design for our resilience programme. This study provides a huge opportunity for learning about resilience building in Malawi and will enable us to adapt our interventions in real time during programme implementation."

Click here for the event program.

Presentations available as SlideShare and PDF below.

Day 1

1. BRACC Impact Evaluation Design, presented by Daniel Gilligan, IFPRI, Washington, DC; PDF (640 KB) available here
2. BRACC Baseline Survey Results, presented by Jan Duchoslav, IFPRI Malawi; PDF (1 MB) available here
3. WFP Resilience Monitoring Results, presented by Blessings Chida, WFP Malawi; PDF (1 MB) available here
4. Measuring Resilience, presented by Edwin Kenamu and Jack Thunde, IFPRI Malawi; PDF (413 KB) available here
5. Lessons from Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme, presented by Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, IFPRI Ethiopia; PDF (643 KB) available here

Day 2

1. Measuring Indicators for Resilience Analysis (MIRA), presented by Julie Ideh, CRS Malawi; PDF (1 MB) available here
2. Mechanism Experiments, presented by Jan Duchoslav, IFPRI Malawi, PDF (257 KB) available here
3. Next Steps: Qualitative Investigations, presented by Kenan Kalagho, IFPRI consultant, PDF (154 KB) available here
4. Measuring Community Disaster Resilience, presented by Olivia Chilora, GOAL Malawi, PDF (799 KB) available here
5. IFPRI Closing Remarks, presented by Bob Baulch, IFPRI Malawi; PDF (1 MB) available here