Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS), a consortium of national and international organizations, supports marginalized communities in Somalia to become more resilient to shocks and stresses, including as a result of climate change, through a contextually adaptive approach. The BRCiS Consortium is implementing BRCiS III, a five-year resilience project funded by FCDO, in nineteen districts in the Southern and Central regions Somalia and is supporting households across 172 communities.
The long-term objective of the BRCiS III project is to contribute to reduced severity of humanitarian needs and displacement in Somalia by supporting marginalized communities in rural Somalia to have sufficient social, financial, and environmental assets to better cope with shocks and stresses and adapt to the effects of climate change.
To achieve this outcome, BRCiS will implement a series of layered and sequenced, mutually reinforcing outputs designed to strengthen the systems most likely to support rural communities in Somalia to cope with high impact shocks and stresses in the short term and adapt to climate change in the medium to longer term.
Causal Design is collaborating with the BRCiS Consortium to assess the levels of resilience capacities of BRCiS III communities and to what extent those and wellbeing outcomes improve over the course of BRCiS III. As BRCiS programming is targeting resilience at the household, community, and larger ecosystem levels, the BRCiS III measurement strategy assesses resilience capacities at all three levels including household surveys, Community Scoring Dialogues, and an assessment of the surrounding ecosystems.
Further, as resilience capacities across all these levels interact and are synergistic, these aspects of resilience are integrated together in a single measurement, developed by BRCiS and Causal Design, called the Resilience Spectrum Score. This index is a qualitative measure that is meant to provide indicative evidence of change in resilience capacities over time.
This approach to measuring resilience is unique in that it integrates multiple levels of resilience capacities in a single measure. It acknowledges that a household’s ability to prepare for and weather shocks is influenced not only by their own capacities but by the larger capacities of the community and the broader ecosystem.
This baseline report highlights key findings across data collected at each of the household, community, and ecosystem levels and seeks to understand the profile of the BRCiS III project target areas, the types and impacts of shocks and stresses experienced by communities, the differential effects on vulnerable groups, the coping strategies employed by households, the existing resilience capacities, and the pathways to improving resilience to inform the design and implementation of BRCiS III resilience-building interventions.
