If you ask people in Malawi what the benefit is of the Enhancing Community Resilience Project, they’ll tell you, “No one died during the 2015 floods because [community] members went around in the night waking people up.” Communities using CARE tools and resources to work together and save lives. It’s hard to get more powerful than that.
If you want more evidence, the research says that for every $1 the project invested, Malawi was able to avert $4 in damages from emergencies. Families had more assets, and were able to bounce back faster. The Enhancing Community Resilience project was funded by DFID, Norway, and Irish Aid and led by Christian Aid. CARE’s component was $5.7 million and reached 31,800 people between 2011-2017.
What did we accomplish?
- Families are wealthier: Families in the project have up to $183 more in assets than families who didn’t participate. Families with women in charge had 16% higher incomes while other families had stable income.
- People have more food: The number of people who didn’t have enough food got cut in half. Women-headed families were 27% more likely to have food for all 12 months of the year.
- Farmers are more resilient: 14% of families are more likely to have food even when there is a drought or a flood. Farmers are also twice as likely to have weather data that helps them plan their crops.
- Women make more decisions: Women are 30% more likely to be involved in decisions about crops and 15% more likely to be able to work with their husbands to make marketing decisions.
- Women’s workload went down: 86% of women, and 76% of men said that new agricultural techniques helped them reduce their workload.
- Governments scaled our models up: The Malawian National Climate Change Policy and National Resilience Plan, as well as some major donor programs in Malawi, have started adopting CARE’s Participatory Scenario Planning tools.
How did we get there?
- Be efficient: CARE’s VSLA model costs $19 per participant, as opposed to $23 that partners spent. On the whole, the project cost $2.68 per person (including direct and indirect participants).
- Work with government officials: The project worked with local extension officers and community volunteers. They also got them involved with the community to plan decisions together. As a result, government official were faster to respond to crises, more focused on climate change as an issue, and twice as likely to organize events for communities than they had been before.
- Focus on women: In addition to working with 66% women, the project built in gender dialogues, trained the staff on gender equality, and built gender into every aspect of the program.
- Really support the frontline staff: The project staffed 1 supervisor for every 18 field agents. That’s higher than many projects, but gave the frontline staff the support and motivation they needed to get the job done.
- Build early warning systems: Communities that had early warning systems got $77 more in benefits that just the basic project package gave them, and they were 16% more likely to have information in enough time to react. Women were 25% more likely to get information through these packages than they were before.
Want to learn more?
Read the final evaluation.