Lessons from livelihood interventions that increase the resilience of populations to droughts in Afghanistan and other FCAS

This review highlights the prominence of ‘resilience’ in donor interventions, but that there is a continued lack of clarity on how it should be measured or evaluated. This rapid review uses broad search categories and approaches, including database and website searches and snowballing of references. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed iteratively, with abstracts and documents assessed to find the most relevant papers. Donor databases were searched for relevant information. Much of the literature identified through this rapid review is donor-based evaluations of projects in Afghanistan. However, many of these evaluations are mainly concerned with project outputs and issues of implementation and process, particularly those relating to routine project monitoring and evaluation in fragile situations. Less robust information was provided on the success/results, appropriateness and lessons learned from the interventions themselves.

This review shows a breadth of resilience and livelihood programming in Afghanistan, especially aimed at agriculture and livestock. It was not possible to explore all the evidence and evaluations identified; priority was given to systematic reviews of multiple interventions and evaluations with clear lessons on intervention success. Furthermore, as this paper covers a broad range of interventions and much of the evidence consists of micro-level case studies, the lessons gleaned from the literature must be taken as illustrative, and in no way comprehensive or conclusive. It is also important to consider the highly context-specific nature of climate change effects, livelihood characteristics and interventions.