Top 5 Resilience Dashboard Highlights

By Corena Sharp and Emily Marshall, The REAL Award

For anyone curious about the effects of resilience programming, the Resilience Evaluation, Analysis and Learning (REAL) Award worked with the Institute for Development Impact to create a data visualization tool to help measure and analyze the results of resilience-strengthening interventions and humanitarian assistance provided to households in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Nepal.

In this blog, we would like to share with you the top five ways this dashboard can help you explore data to inform and improve activity design and implementation:

1. The Interactive Map

Dive deep into individual countries and learn about the specific indicators that resilience practitioners use to measure resilience to shocks and stresses, resilience capacities, coping strategies, and food security outcomes.

“This section is excellent and something I will cite in my work. I really appreciate the breakdown by capacity area and the clear explanation (with citation) to how each index score is calculated.” — Austen Moore, Senior Technical Advisor, Agricultural Recovery & Resilience, Catholic Relief Services

A map displays information about the Shock Exposure Index. Burkina Faso is selected from the six countries highlighted to display a summary of its shock indices. You can change the information displayed on the map by selecting a major category, a specific index within that category, or a country highlighted on the map.

2. Protective Effects of Capacities

Resilience capacity indices are composite measures of variables that reflect the ability of households and systems to prepare for and cope with shocks and stresses. Explore the “Protective Effect of Capacities by Duration of Effect” bubble chart to learn about the components of each resilience capacity index in this section, and explore whether that component has an initial, continuous, or long-term protective effect for each country. If you prefer a tabular view, click “Protective Effect of Capacities by Context” to easily compare the protective effects by country!

A bubble chart groups resilience capacity components by the duration of their protective effect. Choose from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, and Zimbabwe to see their resilience capacity components.

A chart displays the duration of the resilience capacity category for each of the countries.

3. Compare and Contrast Programs in Sankey Diagrams

In these two “Sankey” diagrams, click on the colorful rectangles next program name to learn more about it, and click on the rectangles next to each category to understand how these resilience capacities or forms of humanitarian assistance facilitated household resilience during shocks and stresses. When you click on a resilience capacity or form of humanitarian assistance, lines will appear to show the linkages between those categories and the program from which this evidence was drawn.

Two Sankey charts from the dashboard. The first lists the most common forms of humanitarian assistance, with lines linking each one to the programs that provided it. The second chart lists programs with lines to the resilience capacities each supported. You can select any of the programs, resilience capacities, or humanitarian assistance to see how it connects and read a description. Tip: Click on the ? for an extra chart!

4. Explore Critical Resilience Capacities and Key Factors of Humanitarian Assistance for Effective Resilience Programming

These sections highlight critical resilience capacities for effective coping and the top factors of humanitarian assistance for effective resilience-focused programming. These key themes were identified in multiple studies across a variety of geographical locations. Click on each tab to read our in-depth descriptions and even poke around in the additional resources if you’d like to learn more about a specific context!

Five resilience capacity components are highlighted to showcase how each contributes to effective coping. You can read an explanation and explore additional resources in each tab.

“Excellent contribution to resilience measurement tools” — Katherine Braga, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist, Jefferson Solutions

Three key factors of humanitarian assistance are displayed, and you can read why each is important for effective resilience-focused programming.

5. Key Takeaways

If the data from the interactive dashboard has you thinking, “What now?” scroll down to our Key Takeaways section to discover thoughtful conclusions drawn from the data paired with practical suggestions for improving resilience programming. Click on each tab to read through a related set of conclusions.

There are three categories of key takeaways, including what works in resilience programming, what to consider when designing resilience programming, and resilience programming adaptive management and monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

“This is the section that has the most use for me as I consider general guidance to teams designing activities. I appreciate each of the ‘should’ statements. And I would like to see them considered robustly as BHA [USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance] and RFS [USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security] develop and revise strategies for HA [humanitarian assistance], ER4 [Early Recovery, Risk Reduction, and Resilience], and resilience programming.” — Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw, Catholic Relief Services

Where To Go From Here

Since its inception in 2016, REAL has conducted extensive resilience research and has published several reports and learning products. This dashboard synthesizes the findings from all this research into an engaging and practical format. Whether you are just starting to learn about resilience programming or you’re an resilience M&E specialist, we hope this dashboard helps you uncover new insights and improve future activities. Take a look at this instructional video, if you would like to learn more about how to use the dashboard. Email REAL@savechildren.org if you have any questions.