Ayalneh Bogale and Manzamasso Hodjo
Building Resilience to Multiple Shocks and Stresses
to Protect Development Gains in Ethiopia

#2023 AGRODEP CONFERENCE
 Introduction
 Main triggers of natural and human-induced disasters in Ethiopia
 Genesis and institutionalization of effective response and resilience
building in Ethiopia
 Salient features of policies and strategies for effective response and
resilience
 Empirical evidence on change in household resilience
 Lessons learned: drivers of effective response and resilience building
 Strategic pathways
Outline of the presentation

1. Introduction
 Background
 Mounting evidence points to profound economic transformation Ethiopia has
achieved from 1995 to 2016
 Ethiopia is also exposed to a wide range of disasters: natural and human induced
 If the country continues a business-as-usual approach to crisis response, it will not
be able to manage the increasing scale of the challenges
 Thus, there is call by all stakeholders for a paradigm shift in the way the country
deals with communities at risk if it has to sustain the recent development gains
 Main objective - reviewing and documenting strategic interventions by the GoE in
terms of adopting policies, strategies and programmes, building the necessary
institutional structures that enhance resilience to multiple shocks.

Figure 1. Ethiopia basic statistics
GDP (Cons 2015 US$)= 95.07 bill
37% 24% 39%
CPI = 34.7
Food = 43.4
Foreign exchange
earning = US$ 3.62 bill
(%)
25.1
15.8
15.8
11.1
4.4
114.6 mil
2.53%
US$ 827
3.48%
Share of pop. in extreme
poverty = 22%

 Ethiopia has characterized its economic policy as
“agricultural development-led industrialization,” in mid-
1990s.
 Puts an emphasis on raising productivity of smallholder
farmers, improve food security and generate broadly
shared income gains
 Results
 agricultural output more than tripled between 1993 and
2018, (average 5% per year)
 share of the Ethiopian population subsisting on less
than US$1.90/day had been cut in half by 2015,
 fraction of children under age five suffering from
stunting fell from 67 percent in 1992 in to 37 percent
in 2019
 Since 2015, however, agricultural output in Ethiopia
appears to have stagnated
 resilience and sustainability

 Conceptual understanding of resilience
 The concept of resilience has been defined, researched, and
debated across many academic disciplines as well as operational
sectors and agencies, and has grown increasingly popular in recent
years in development and policy discourse
 UNISDR (2005), DFID (2011), USAID (2012), UN Common
Guidance on Helping Build Resilient Societies (UN, 2020)
 FAO (2021) - “the ability to prevent disasters and crises as well as
to anticipate, absorb, accommodate or recover from them in a
timely, efficient and sustainable manner. This includes protecting,
restoring and improving livelihoods systems in the face of threats
that impact agriculture, nutrition, food security and food safety."

 Resilience is not an outcome, but a capacity that influences
outcomes: common and crucial capabilities:
 Anticipative capacity: ability to take early action in anticipation of a potential threat,
 Preventive capacity: ability to implement activities and take measures to reduce
existing risks and avoid the creation of new risks,
 Absorptive capacity: ability to take protective action and ‘bounce back’ after a shock,
 Adaptive capacity: The ability to make incremental adjustments, modifications or
changes to the characteristics of systems,
 Transformative capacity: The ability to create a fundamentally new system when
ecological, economic or social structures make the existing system untenable.

Figure 2. The Resilience Conceptual Framework
Source: DFID, 2011

2. Main Triggers of Natural and Human-induced Disasters in Ethiopia
- Ethiopia: Disaster risk
profile
- Among the most disaster-prone
countries in Africa
- Rely disproportionately on annual
crops cultivated on marginal lands
- Insecure land tenure
- Land productivity is generally very
low

Drought and
Weather-
related
Disasters
1972–1973
The 1972/73 Famine:
“The unknown famine”
1984–1985
The 1984/85 Famine:
Drought, War and
Policy Failure
2010–2011
The 2010/11 Drought:
Ethiopia avoided
famine- a step towards
resilience
2015–2016
The 2015/16 Drought:
From saving lives to
protecting livelihoods

3. Genesis and Institutionalization of effective response and
resilience in Ethiopia
 1974 The pioneering organization was the Relief and Rehabilitation
Commission (RRC) established in 1974
 1995 RRC was restructured and named Disaster Prevention and Preparedness
Commission (DPPC) in 1995 with significant changes in mandate to
strengthen the linkages between relief and early warning and response
 2004 DPPC was renamed again as the Disaster Prevention and Preparedness
Agency (DPPA) in 2004 without significant change in the mandate
 2007 Transformed into Disaster Risk Management and Food Security Sector
(DRMFSS) in 2007
 2015 The latest institutional change created the National Disaster Risk
Management Commission (NDRMC) in 2015

The National Disaster Preparedness and Prevention
Strategy (NDPPS) – 1989
The National Policy on Disaster Prevention and
Management (NPDPM) - 1993
The National Policy and Strategy on Disaster Risk
Management (NPSDRM) - 2013
National and Sectoral Policies and Strategies
Disaster Risk Management Strategic Programme and
Investment Framework (DRM SPIF) - 2014
International Conventions and Instruments
4. Salient features
of policies and
strategies for
effective response
and resilience

5. Empirical
evidence on
change in
household
resilience
 Resilience has become promising concept
for understanding how households cope
with and recover from shocks and stressors
 Many attempts at measuring resilience have
been proposed over recent years:
quantitative and qualitative
 Employs Resilience Index Measurement and
Analysis (RIMA)
 RIMA approximates household resilience
using the resilience capacity index (RCI).
 RCI is a statistic that summarizes a
household’s status with respect to some
selected welfare indicator (food insecurity)
 It is based on four pillars, namely access to
basic services (ABS), assets (AST), social
safety nets (SSN) and adaptative capacity
(AC).

 Two stage procedure to estimate RCI
 Factor analysis (FA) to identify the attributes, or “pillars,” that
contribute to household resilience, starting with observed
variables.
 RCI was obtained using a latent variable model, termed
MIMIC (Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes)
 The RCI of a household, i at time t, is a function of:
 Access to Basic Services (ABS)
 Assets (AST)
 Adaptive Capacity (AC)
 Social Safety Networks (SSN)
 Employed the web-based Shiny RIMA tool

Item Variables
Means
difference St Err t-value
2011 2018
RCI Resilience Capacity Index 22.56 24.48 1.92*** 0.425 4.5
ABS
Inverse distance to water point 0.033 0.143 0.11*** 0.011 9.85
Access to toilets 0.459 0.568 0.108*** 0.025 4.4
Inverse distance to medical centre 0.191 0.379 0.188*** 0.04 4.75
Access to electricity 0.202 0.501 0.298*** 0.024 12.45
Assets
Wealth Index 0.06 0.144 0.084*** 0.007 11.3
Agric tools index 0.088 0.097 0.008* 0.005 1.65
Tropical livestock Units 2.841 2.776 -0.065 0.204 -0.3
Agriculture Land area 0.698 0.382 -0.316*** 0.05 -6.4
Use of fertilizers 0.477 0.244 -0.233*** 0.033 -7.1
SSN
Cash assistance 330.4 1494.5 1164.11*** 63.393 18.35
Informal Transfer 479.4 2197.8 1718.45*** 472.9 3.65
In kind Assistance 36.46 110.31 73.847*** 11.931 6.2
Food assistance 495.0 1021.6 526.596*** 83.899 6.3
AC
Access to education 0.399 0.123 -0.276*** 0.021 -13.15
Inv dependency ratio 1.397 1.621 0.225*** 0.054 4.15
Ag diversity Index 0.119 0.105 -0.014*** 0.007 -1.9
Income diversity index 0.352 0.537 0.185*** 0.009 20.6
Food security
FCS 6.065 6.232 0.167*** 0.043 3.9
HDDS 39.37 39.573 0.2 0.338 -0.6
Table 1. Two-sample T-test results for change in RCI and its pillar variables b/n 2011 and 2018

Figure 5. Relative importance of pillars in household RCI for
2011 and 2018

Figure 6. Change in resilience for male and female-headed households
21.21 21.43
24.76
25.87
MALE FEMALE
RCI
Gender
2011 2018

Figure 7. Relative importance of pillars in RCI for male
and female-headed households
2011 2018

6. Lessons
Learned:
Drivers for
Effective
Response and
Resilience
Building
Sustained Economic Growth and Mainstreaming
DRR
Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP)
Early Warning System and Coordination of
Response/actors
Focus on most Vulnerable Livelihoods- Pastoral
Livelihoods
Conflict Reduction and Peace Building

7. Strategic
pathways
Conflict management and peace building
Promote public and private investment in agriculture
and natural resources
Adaptation to climate change
Promote access to input and output markets
Strengthen governance structure
Emphasize on inclusion of the most vulnerable groups
and environment

THANK YOU