Resilience in Conflict
Explore how Livelihoods for Resilience households leveraged their knowledge, skills and assets to rebuild their livelihoods after conflict.
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The Feed the Future Ethiopia — Livelihoods for Resilience (L4R) Activity was a 6.5-year, USAID-funded project running from December 2016 through July 2023. Building on lessons learned from the preceding project (GRAD), the L4R Activity supported poor rural households to build resilient livelihoods with improved food and nutrition security, even in the face of shocks and stresses.
This brief explores how L4R households in the Tigray and Amhara regions leveraged their knowledge, skills and assets to cope with the northern conflict in 2020-2022, and to rebuild their livelihoods after the conflict. The brief draws on L4R endline survey data collected in June 2023 and qualitative research conducted in April and May 2023, and on Biruh Tesfa monitoring data.
The synergies achieved through the layering of Biruh Tesfa and L4R illustrate the benefits of nexus programming with increased alignment of humanitarian and development programming — made easier, in this instance, by the fact that both projects were implemented by the same team. Their combined effort resulted in a significant impact on resilience through sustained asset ownership and a reduced need for food aid.
Key Resilience Factors
- Village economic and social associations.
- Business experience and livelihood diversification.
- Confidence and aspiration.
- Protection of livelihood gains.
- Small-scale, local private sector and market systems development.
- Gender equity and women’s empowerment.
Recommendations from the Conflict in Tigray and Amhara
These conflict survival and recovery experiences in Tigray and Amhara show how households and communities deploy the skills and resources at hand to build new solutions to their changing circumstances and ensure their own resilience when they have the confidence and solidarity to take action. This learning can inform future programming across the humanitarian to development spectrum.
- Concentrate on building the factors of resilience before crises hit.
- Layer emergency economic resilience support on top of development programming to protect livelihood gains.
- Consider the provision of agricultural inputs and services as a life-saving intervention.
- Design interventions that strengthen household and market systems resilience simultaneously.