2017 ICT4D Conference

How can we measure resilience? Given how severe shocks disproportionally affect the poorest individuals, leading to an ever increasing demand for emergency humanitarian aid, development practitioners are increasingly focused on pre-empting those shocks by boosting household and community resilience. Yet they lack the tools to properly evaluate whether their interventions are having an effect.

Using crowd-sourcing and cloud storage, the 'Measuring Indicators for Resilience Analysis’ (MIRA) project has piloted a comprehensive, end-to-end toolkit for collecting high-frequency data relevant to policymakers. In collaboration with Catholic Relief Services, it uses this toolkit to evaluate the UBALE project in Malawi.

Since new data requires new tools of analysis, we harness developments in machine learning and econometrics to identify whether observed interventions modify household resilience. Building on the poverty trap literature, we provide suggestive evidence that certain interventions increase the likelihood of household escaping from a shock-sensitive regime, while others may perversely keep them stuck by reinforcing their dependence.