Financial services for resilience: How to assess the impacts?
Source
Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters
This report explores the implementation of innovative methodologies to measure the effect of financial services on people's resilience in Niger.
Key messages:
- Niger is a least developed country prone to recurrent drought, which affects a large share of the population and results in severe food security issues.
- Support mechanisms, including access to adequate financial resources, are important for individuals and communities to better prepare for and cope with climate extremes.
- Village savings and loan associations (VSLAs) are implemented as a means to support rural communities, address livelihood shocks and strengthen social capital.
- Two innovative research methods – financial diaries and serious games – have been carried out in Niger, to help support a better understanding of VSLAs’ contribution to climate resilience.
- These innovative tools reveal behavioural changes that help complete our understanding of how VSLAs can contribute to resilience-building in dimensions that are often unexplored, including (i) gender empowerment; (ii) social trust; and (iii) natural resource management.
- This paper paves the way for further analysis of the role of VSLAs in building communities’ resilience by documenting the linkages between financial inclusion and resilience to climate extremes.
- These methods, based on community participation, provide a complementary alternative to traditional monitoring and evaluation methods. They contribute to the ‘monitoring–evaluation–learning’ trinity by mixing evaluation and learning.
Explore further
Hazards
Drought
Themes
Community-based DRR
Gender
Economics of DRR
Social impacts and social resilience
Food security and agriculture
Country and region
Niger
Number of pages
20 p.
Publication Year
2017