July 1, 2026 This ongoing column in Hunger Notes was created years ago to explore the fascination aid agencies have with the term “resilience”, which in many ways years ago replaced other broad, aspirational buzzwords like “development”, “sustainability,” and “empowerment.” Like those other terms, resilience has become a goal of many aid programs, both development and humanitarian. Yet, there has never been concensus about how to measure if and when resilience is achieved. This is because resilience means as many different things as there are programs addressing it.
Food, nutrition and other anti-hunger aid programs have been under the banner of resilience for most of the last decade. Today, the US Department of Agriculture is seeking inputs about its Food for Peace programming including lessons about the large “Resilience Food Security Activities”, or RFSAs whereby diverse NGOs aimed to create resilience. So sharpening and clarifying the relationship between resilience and hunger is timely.
Key donors, including the European Union and US Government, as well as the Red Cross tend to view resilience as “capacity under stress.” IFPRI, and key advisors to the former USAID posited resilience as the ability of households, communities or systems to “withstand, adapt to, and recover from shocks.”
In practice, for any given program, what does this mean? The EU representative in Juba, South Sudan was very clear in defining resilience as the rate of acute malnutrition among children. Other programs measure resilience as essentially being the same thing as sustainability (do the program’s outcomes or systems persist after the end of funding?).
When USAID had an office of resilience, it promoted resilience primarily in terms of household livelihoods, community cohesion and food security throughout cycles of drought and floods, measuring:
- ♦ Resilience capacities (absorptive, adaptive, transformative)
- ♦ Well‑being outcomes (food security, nutrition, income stability)
- ♦ Shock severity and frequency
- ♦ Longitudinal household surveys to observe recovery patterns
The Rockefeller has defined resilience as the capacity of cities, communities, and systems to survive, adapt, and grow despite chronic stresses and acute shocks, and in this includes good, inclusive governance, leadership, and urban planning.
The Red Cross has been piloting resilience measures for many years, focusing on “risk” assessment. It has developed a dashboard which measures resilience across 11 dimensions: disaster/risk management, health, water and sanitation, shelter, food and nutrition security, social cohesion, inclusion, economic opportunities, infrastructure and services, natural resource management, and connectedness. It allows resilience comparisons by community and by demographic categories such as gender and education.
These approaches to resilience are oriented largely toward relief-to-development programming, assuming recurring disasters at the population level.
“Resilience” also is used, quite differently, for measuring ecological and environmental change as well as human psychology. Meanwhile, engineers and architects measure resilience in precise ways such as structural integrity.
A decade ago, a large roundtable, or symposium, was held of 100 experts from government agencies, NGOs and academia to share progress in measuring resilience. The summary can be found here. Among its conclusions: “There are no single metrics. There is a need for evaluations to tell us what resilience is and what works. So far — “Resilience has been episodic and serendipitous through extraordinary people in missions.” (The symposium was hosted by American University, World Vision, Mercy Corps, Catholic Relief Services, the American Red Cross, IBTCI, the Wilson Center, and Management Systems International.)
So, what resilience means in practice will continue to evolve and will be revisited in this column.
