Development Works Number 7, December 2012 | Page 3

Jean-Philippe Debus/Catholic Relief Services

building resilience since they enable people to keep assets
such as livestock and to pause long enough to consider how
they can diversify the ways they earn a living.
Even during an acute hunger crisis, some emergency programs can simultaneously help make the next crisis less severe. A program called “food for work” is just what it sounds
like: everyone in need receives food, and in exchange, those
who are able to work do so. The work contributes to the
community’s future food security—for example, improving
a road used to reach a market town or clearing a pond that
can then be stocked with fish.
Communities should also seek to use their human resources as effectively as possible. Young adults often have
new ideas and the energy and enthusiasm to try different ways of doing things. Women are another group with
unique strengths: “Despite the fact that women … often
bear the heaviest burden of shock and stresses,” USAID
notes, “they also possess enormous individual and collective capacity to help themselves, their families, and their
communities.” A recent study in Sudan found that women
were more likely than men to effectively use available local
resources in diversification strategies.
The thinking behind “resilience” programs is simply that
poor communities can better fight hunger and malnutrition
by identifying potential threats to their main ways of earning
a living and developing workable alternatives—before they
are desperately needed.
David Gressly, U.N. Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sahel, lists some actions that, along with safety
net programs, help communities build resilience: reducing
chronic child malnutrition, improving irrigation and drainage systems, diversifying food sources, finding better ways
to preserve food stocks, and constructing dams to store water that will later irrigate crops.
For four Sahel farmers in Burkina Faso, West Africa, the
key to resilience was a viable alternative to rain-fed crops.
In early 2012, drought destroyed most of their maize crop.
But thanks to an earlier U.S.-funded program to expand
the options of rain-fed crop farmers, the farmers had plots
of land where they had planted more resilient crops. The
development program had helped secure the farmers’ access to land and also provided training for new crops and

Women carrying home water in Miel, Abala district, Niger, where
CRS is helping improve the village wells which now must serve
local people and Malian refugees.

funding for small-scale irrigation efforts. USAID reports
that the women continue to support their families with the
profits from their dry season gardens. One member of the
group, Safieta, explains: “We chose onions because if the
water pump fails for a few days, they’re strong enough to
survive.” She adds: “I am resilient now. Just like the onions.”
Al Hassan Cisse, the Sahel regional food security advocacy coordinator for the development organization Oxfam,
added that another key to resilience is better grain storage.
“Building the resilience of poor people means investing in
food reserves because one of the [aggravating] factors of
food crisis over the past year is the high food prices,” he said.
Another agricultural priority, as identified by the HighLevel Meeting on the Sahel, is promoting drought resistant
production, which will require preserving ecosystems and
eliminating pests and locusts.
It’s also important to plan for resilient development program—for example, when donor funding ends. Nepal’s Action Against Malnutrition through Agriculture (AAMA),
whose nutrition and poultry programs were mentioned
earlier in Development Works, is preparing for sustainability using strategies such as training trainers, seeking modest
resources from village councils, and encouraging successful
participants to give chicks women just getting started.
USAID’s Resilience Policy focuses on the root causes of
vulnerability and on coordination with local partners (for
example, as a member of the Global Alliance for Action for

3

Years out of the past four that the Sahel region
has suffered a severe drought

Map: Baptist Global Response

18 Million

People at risk in nine
African Sahel countries in early 2012
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