Risk & Resilience
Measuring Risk to Build Resilience
Integrating water access, climate stress, and household resilience into one programming lens.
Overview
Resilience programming separated irrigation investments from domestic water access. The program needed an integrated vulnerability lens at community scale.
Resilience programming works when irrigation and domestic water access are treated as one system—not two budgets.
Advanced Economic Research
J. Environmental Management (2025)
Challenge · Solution · Result
- Challenge: Droughts and erratic rainfall threatened farm households with limited water resource access.
- Solution: Household surveys and econometric modeling of resilience outcomes linked to water availability.
- Result: Assessments of climate, conflict, and resource risk that help institutions design stronger mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Water Under Stress
Households between drought and scarcity
Droughts and erratic rainfall threatened farm households with limited water resource access. Resilience programming had separated irrigation investments from domestic water access.
The program needed an integrated vulnerability lens at community scale before the next investment cycle locked in.
Measuring What Resilience Means
Surveys, climate layers, and governance
Household surveys and econometric modeling linked resilience outcomes to water availability through seasonal water-point audits, contingent valuation on coping bundles, and spatial joins to gridded climate projections.
Panel estimation of nutrition and labor outcomes conditional on shared water governance rules made the trade-offs visible to district partners.
From Map to Mid-Term Review
Programming that integrates WASH and agriculture
Strategies now integrate water management into agricultural planning and resilience programming.
A joint agriculture–WASH investment map for three regions and M&E indicators adopted in the resilience project’s mid-term review gave partners a shared scorecard.
Partners
- UNDP
- District assemblies
- Community water boards
