CLEAR-AA’s Evidence Review Charts the Future of Resilience Building in Southern Africa
The Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results Anglophone Africa (CLEAR-AA) has concluded a major research initiative in collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), analyzing resilience-building efforts across Southern Africa.
The study, conducted between February and December 2024, provides a comprehensive summary of evaluation evidence of WFP’s resilience interventions, offering insights into achievements, challenges, and opportunities for strengthening resilience-building programs within regional food systems.
The research looked at evaluations commissioned by WFP between 2017 and 2024, covering 12 Southern African countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, the Republic of Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The study synthesized findings from 24 evaluations.
CLEAR-AA submitted the final report to WFP in December 2024 addressing the following key areas:
- The extent to which WFP’s resilience-building interventions are aligned with the local context.
- The performance and impact of resilience-building activities.
- Demonstrating evidence of the outcomes generated by resilience-building initiatives for the targeted populations.
- The extent to which the program supported women and men, girls and boys, older persons and persons living with disabilities, in strengthening their resilience.
- How current activities enable communities and institutions, including government and social protection systems, to become self-reliant and better equipped to adapt to shocks.
The report highlights that resilience interventions must be tailored to local contexts and informed by rigorous evaluations to maximize their impact. CLEAR-AA’s research also stresses the need for scalable and innovative approaches to enhance learning outcomes and improve the well-being of climate-vulnerable communities.
The WFP’s Resilience and Climate Change team in Johannesburg intends to use these findings to refine and inform future integrated resilience-building interventions. The report's conclusions will play a vital role in shaping policies and strategies aimed at fostering long-term sustainability and adaptability in the region.
"Our recent experience with collating and integrating evaluation evidence for resilience-building has illuminated how crucial it is to ground evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) on rigorous, context-specific evaluation evidence," said Samukelisiwe Mkhize, Research and Learning Officer at CLEAR-AA in a blog post for the Africa Evidence Network.