Attachments
Overview
This Strategic Resilience Assessment (STRESS) in Northeast Nigeria illustrates how communities can build resilience to shocks and stresses within the context of ongoing conflict or humanitarian crisis and protect progress toward humanitarian and development goals. Mercy Corps defines resilience as the capacity of communities in complex socio-ecological systems to learn, cope, adapt, and transform in the face of change. Resilience is not the end goal, but rather the way that well-being—in humanitarian and development terms—continues on a positive trajectory in spite of disruption. Undertaken between June 2017 and July 2018 and drawing from both primary and secondary data, this STRESS process seeks to understand what factors support or undermine resilience in the complex crisis context of Borno, and then identify a set of capacities that can contribute to a shared vision for humanitarian and development stakeholders in Borno over the next 3-5 years.
The STRESS process encourages us to think differently. Five overarching questions guide Mercy Corps’ STRESS:
Resilience to what end? Resilience of which systems? Resilience to which shocks and stresses? Resilience for which groups? Resilience through what capacities? Using a participatory assessment and analysis process, the STRESS goes beyond reporting assessment “findings” in the traditional sense to developing recommendations on how practitioners can meaningfully integrate risk reduction and resilience-building measures.
It is designed to capture and analyze the risks communities are facing—combining local insights with an analysis of higher-level trends, systems dynamics, and the factors shaping vulnerability for different groups of people—and what this means for their ability to cope and adapt over time.
The STRESS in Borno also sought to understand how “the conflict” as an overarching stress impacts people’s livelihoods, social cohesion, and food security, and what it means to build resilience within protracted conflict. We determined that conflict is best understood as a system, with impacts that manifest as discrete shocks and stresses. These shocks and stresses interact and multiply, increasing vulnerability and in some cases driving new conflict risks. By breaking down shocks and stresses this way within the conflict system, resilience capacities can then be defined and strengthened to help address the interrelated drivers and impacts of the challenges communities in Borno are facing. The STRESS findings underscore the imperative for practitioners and policy-makers to deepen our understanding of what builds resilience in the face of conflict at both individual and systemic levels and orient responses toward a holistic approach for strengthening resilience capacities.
A systems analysis of the conflict’s root causes and the current crisis dynamics were integrated into the STRESS methodology. These framed and informed a theory of change for building resilience capacities in Borno. This theory of change seeks to build resilience in support of : 1) inclusive economic opportunities and growth and the benefit those opportunities and growth offer to restore livelihoods; 2) improved social cohesion across communities, particularly recognizing the role of social cohesion as a safety net for coping with shocks and as a critical pathway towards peace and security; and 3) food security, primarily through the lens of food availability and access.
Why Resilience?
Given the overwhelming scale of the challenge in Borno, it is clear that instability at some level will continue into the foreseeable future. The infrastructure damage, lost livelihoods, and years of education missed, when added to the extensive development challenges that existed prior to the conflict, mean these issues are likely to become generational ones. It is also essential to understand the interconnected nature of the shocks and stresses described here. They do not stand in isolation; instead, they are mutually reinforcing. Despite improvements in some areas, any progress is fragile, and a deterioration of security (even temporary) or a bad crop season could upset the delicate recovery process in communities, amplifying household poverty and forcing people to resort to increasingly negative coping strategies.
The future of Borno’s youth depends upon on their ability to manage the shocks and stresses that they face daily. They are confronting changing labor markets, risks from reintegration and return, and political transition, in addition to a landscape increasingly impacted by climate change and resource degradation.
This is why we must change our framing of humanitarian programming. Even as we address urgent basic needs, we have a moral imperative to integrate resilience thinking into our program design in ways that strengthen multiple capacities by layering humanitarian and development strategies.