How mobile phones can be used to track people’s views on resilience: key findings from Myanmar

Resilience continues to dominate the international development agenda. With financial support towards resilience-building activities increasing in recent years, funders want to see impact and value for money. Unfortunately, monitoring and evaluation of resilience is tricky. For a start, the definition of resilience is heavily contested, with hundreds of different measurement frameworks to choose from. More importantly, traditional resilience measurement is costly and time-consuming. Evaluations rely heavily on large face-toface household surveys that can take hours to administer and are difficult to coordinate – particularly in conflict-affected or post-disaster areas. As funders continue to demand cheaper, easier and more robust ways of measuring resilience, new ideas and innovations are desperately needed (COSA, 2017). It is here that the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme aims to provide new insights. As part of its Rapid Response Research (RRR) project in Myanmar, a number of unique innovations were trialled, allowing the collection of high-frequency data at a fraction of the cost of traditional surveys. In this brief, we synthesise some of the main findings from the RRR project, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of the project’s new approaches. While we provide quick highlights of each insight (there are eight in total), we encourage readers to delve into the more detailed working papers associated with each key finding.