Mercy Corps Role of Social Capital in Agro-Pastoral Resilience in The

Assessing the Role of Social Capital in Agro-pastoral Resilience in the Sahel: A Systems Perspective

In coordination with Mercy Corps and the Elliott School of International Affairs Morgan Blackburn, Alejandro Guzman, Jeff Lieberman and Anne Sprinkel

April 25, 2014

Acknowledgements

The capstone team would like to express a deep appreciation for the many supporters and facilitators of this project. We owe a great deal of gratitude to Sarah Wardwell, the Mercy Corps West Africa Resilience Coordinator, for her guidance and supervision. Also to Thierno Diallo and Sebastien Fesneau, Mercy Corps Country Directors for Niger and Mali, respectively. The Niger and Mali country teams provided invaluable support without which the execution of this project would not have been possible. Finally, to the many contributors who provided feedback during the research and execution of the project, and the development of this report, including Mercy Corps staff from both the Washington D.C. and Portland offices.

We would also like to thank Dr. Sean Roberts, Director of the International Development Studies Program at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, who contributed generously to the team with his guidance, support, and wisdom.

Executive Summary

In order to support the implementation of Mercy Corps’ Regional Value Proposition for Resilience in the Sahel, the research team looked at agro-pastoral communities’ resilience to food insecurity in the face of drought and conflict shocks. This was accomplished through a literature review and the development and field-testing of a systems-based community assessment tool to gauge agro-pastoral communities’ existing social capital and its role in promoting resilience in the face of shocks and stresses. The systems-based approach to social capital is founded in an understanding that “problems” like a food crises are the result of a number of smaller system failures resulting from a shock or long-term, lower level stresses on the system and its environment. The ebb and flow of power and vulnerability, as reflected in the use and distribution of social capitals, through time can help identify leverage points for intervention. Furthermore, the exercise allows development and humanitarian actors to understand the system-wide effects of interventions, which may result in more resilience for one group at the expense of another. Focus group discussions in five sample communities in these countries are the basis for the conclusions and recommendations set forth in this document. The Feed the Future “Community Resilience: Conceptual Framework and Measurement” was accepted as the base conceptual framework1, while a systems approach was used as the analytical framework for this research. Using these frameworks, the research team sought to understand the strengths, weaknesses, relationships, and leverage points within Sahelian agro-pastoralist communities that enable individuals, households and communities to learn, cope, adapt, and possibly transform in the face of recurrent drought and conflict. Mercy Corps defines The research revealed severely reduced levels of critical adaptive and resilience as the capacity of transformative capacities to food insecurity in the sampled communities in complex communities. Although data reflected a number of communal coping socio-ecological systems to mechanisms reflecting absorptive capacities, these are primarily used learn, cope, adapt, and to maintain basic subsistence levels. Informal bonding linkages, such transform in the face of as credit, lending, and borrowing, represented the most robust set of coping mechanisms in the face of recurring shocks and stresses shocks and stresses. present in participating communities. However, there were noticeable differences in groups’ abilities to employ these and absorb the effects of drought and conflict. Women’s limited access to land (and subsequent inability to secure land tenure) limited the range of viable coping mechanisms they could employ. Many times, these absorptive capacities do not contribute to resilience, but rather erode or degrade their long-term and short-term resilience, both at the household and community level. Communities tend to experience a persistence of shocks and stressors, which systematically degrades the communities’ capacity to absorb, respond to, and recover from shocks.

One of the most evident trends is the limited transformative capacities across all communities. The research revealed minimal effort on the part of governments as well as NGOs to facilitate the creation of greater transformative capacities. Rather, current efforts are primarily address end-result needs of system failures (such as the provision of food aid), creating a bias towards the promotion of absorptive and adaptive capacities. This may be a contributing factor to the ineffectiveness of programming that fails to address the systemic failures and continues to target these end-result needs year after year.

Women and youth groups were distinct in their views of their communities and thus provided valuable insight to inequalities within the systems. In Mali and Niger, social cohesion has been a source of survival in the face of near continuous shocks and stresses such as drought and conflict. Through this research, it has become clear that these informal relationships within and between communities and larger systems cannot be ignored and must be capitalized upon to enhance resilience to food insecurity. The research

1 While many conceptual frameworks for modeling resilience exist, the research team chose this one for its relative acceptance by USAID and most closely matched the research objectives of the team. 2 provides a snapshot that can deepen communities’ understandings of their own barriers and opportunities. However, a full system analysis was outside the scope of this research and the capabilities of the tool. Therefore, this tool should be one part of a much broader toolkit that includes economic, environmental, political, and other areas of analysis.

Introduction

Mercy Corps is currently working in North, West, Central and East Africa to enhance communities’ resilience by reducing the effects of social, economic, and natural resource constraints. The organization plans to drive forward regional and country strategies as part of the Regional Value Proposition on Resilience in the Sahel. The research team aimed to support this implementation through the development and field-testing of a systems-based community assessment tool. The tool is meant to gauge agro-pastoral communities’ existing social capital, which is recognized as an essential aspect of communal resilience, and the effects of drought and conflict on systems’ resilience to food insecurity in relation to social capital.

This project has been driven by field leadership from inception and is therefore based in Niger and Mali field teams’ perspectives, needs, and experiences. A literature review provided a knowledge base reflecting both academic and development literature on the effects of food insecurity, conflict, and drought on agro- pastoralist communities in the Sahel. Taking this forward, the Capstone team was able to compare and contrast knowledge gained from field staff’s vital participation in the creation of the methodology while providing a critical lens through which to analyze data gathered. Critical to these points was the introduction of a systems approach to assessing community resilience. Field staff’s understanding of resilience in the context of the Sahel was found to be very advanced, but a systems approach was introduced to deepen this understanding and subsequent application to current and future programming. This was achieved through the pilot testing of the Systems-based Community Assessment Tool in 16 focus group discussions in five communities in Mali and Niger. This data forms the basis of the findings that contribute to a deeper understanding of communal resilience in the region.

This report begins with a background explaining the concepts that are the foundation of this document. The definition and use of the term resilience is drawn from both Mercy Corps’ definition and the Feed the Future (FtF) Framework for Communal Resilience, which promotes three types of social capital as the basis for communal action capacities leading to resilience. This is followed by a brief explanation of a systems approach. The research methodology, including the literature review and the building and implementation of the Systems-based Community Assessment Tool, includes concrete examples of the added value, limitations, and opportunities presented by this research. The findings are focused on the characterization of the agro-pastoralist system in relation to forms of bonding, bridging and linking social capital that have been affected by community-identified shocks and stresses. These findings are drawn from raw data that was analyzed through a matrix that categorizes capitals in relation to communal action capacities for resilience, thus leading to conclusions of trends in the region and recommendations for further use of the tool and further study.

This research is by no means an exhaustive study of resilience to food insecurity in agro-pastoralist communities in the Sahel. Rather, this study offers an introduction to the structure and function of these systems in the face of drought and conflict, lending a preliminary snapshot of communities’ communal action capacities that contribute to resilience. The findings originate from only five communities lying within a large geographic area that is characterized by social, economic, and climate variability; thus, the contextual nature of the conclusions and recommendations should be recognized. However, the literature review, collaboration with field staff, tool development, and piloting of the methodology have allowed for a regional focus that is meant to inform the subject while providing an easy-to-use tool that can be contextualized for different geographic, livelihood, and resilience purposes.

Background Resilience Mercy Corps defines resilience as the “capacity of communities in socio-ecological systems to learn, cope, adapt, and transform in the face of shocks and stresses,”2. Simply put, communities consisting of men, women, boys, and girls living in households within these communities are able to withstand recurring and unexpected challenges such as drought and conflict. Communities and individuals must not only endure, but also overcome the challenges that shocks present and learn how to better prepare for future events in order to achieve resilience. It is understood that there is no single route, strategy or mechanism to achieve resilience. A resilience approach recognizes that the primary drivers of positive coping must come from within the community itself, leading to effective self-organization and gradual increase in communal capacities to cope with varied shocks and stressors.

Mercy Corps and a wide range of development and humanitarian partners have used the FtF Framework to understand resilience in East Africa. This framework is based on the assumption that social capital is the basis for communal action capacities, including absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities demonstrated by communities to enhance different levels of resilience. Social capital can be described as the quantity and quality of social resources such as networks, membership in groups, social relations, and access to wider institutions in society, upon which people draw in pursuit of livelihoods3. Social cohesion brings a community together and can promote greater self-organization. This is achieved through bonding, bridging and linking social capital. Annex 3 contains an explanatory diagram. These capitals contribute to Communal Capacities for resilience.

● Bonding Social Capital is the links or bonds that exist amongst community groups, which promote communal cohesion. This excludes political or other formal organization and is normally based on principles such as trust, cooperation and reciprocity. ● Bridging Social Capital is the links or bonds connecting members of one community to other communities or external groups. This allows for access to external social, economic and political assets that may be called upon during times of need. ● Linking Social Capital is the links, bonds and interactions between community groups that occur through formal, institutionalized entities or mechanisms. These are particularly important in explicit or formal communal organization surrounding resource management, governance, economic development, etc.

 Absorptive capacities reflect the ability to incorporate coping mechanisms and preventive measures in order to minimize exposure to shocks and stresses and reduce permanent negative impacts, such as being part of a cooperative that maintains a cereal bank for the lean season.  Adaptive capacities are proactive measures taken around livelihood practices that are determined in accordance with perceived changes in the communal environment as it is impacted by a shock or stress, such as reduced food intake during a food shortage.  Transformative capacities are characterized by “the governance mechanisms, policies/regulations, infrastructure, community networks, and formal and informal social protection mechanisms that constitute the enabling environment for systemic change,”1 This could include infrastructure investment or a redistributive land tenure policy being informed by gender analysis.

2 Mercy Corps Africa Resilience Statement, 2013 3 Frankenberger and Garrett, 1998 4

A Systems Approach A systems approach recognizes that the interacting parts of a family, community, market, country or region must be Characteristics of a Social System analyzed in function of how they relate to each other and I. Subcomponents are interrelated with other elements of the wider encompassing II. Boundaries and scale are defined environment. A common way of thinking about a system is by the observer that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It is III. Constantly changing, meaning driven by the understanding that complex systems, such as observations are bound in time social systems, are made up of smaller, interrelated and space components, or subsystems, while also forming part of wider IV. Composed of smaller subsystems, encompassing systems. For instance, a small agro- while forming part of a larger pastoralist village is itself a social system, but it is also made encompassing system up of smaller, overlapping communal groups (subsystems) V. Processes inputs, while creating such as extended family networks, women’s groups, outputs households, and formalized political structures. Conversely, VI. Subject to feedback loops that it is also part of a larger social system that may include introduce information from the intervening and interacting elements such as governance and external environment market structures. Within systems thinking, one agent’s VII. Neither linear, nor static actions impact another agent’s actions and environment VIII. Different and ever-changing within the system. This represents a novel way for Mercy equilibriums at each system level Corps to approach programming, by analyzing the actors IX. Systems self-organize within the system, the impacts of one actor’s actions on another’s, and subsequently designing programming in a way that accounts for these predictions.

Figure 1

Description of Community System Diagram 1) This represents the community system made up of groups and households that create an intricate network based on relationships. 2) This is the environment within which the system exists. It is itself a wider encompassing system and includes external elements which influence the system: governance, natural environment, conflict, economy, and gender dynamics, among others. 3) Inputs are processed by the system and include influences or interactions with the external environment. 4) Outputs are generated through and from system processes. These are the results of whatever input or stimulus is received from the external environment through feedback loops. 5) Feedback loops occur as system outputs interact with the external environment, creating a new set of inputs that has been influenced by stimuli within and outside of the system. 6) Emergent behaviors are the resulting synthesis of the countless simple interactions taking place within the system which characterize the community.

The value of such an approach is derived from its ability to break down highly complex systems, allowing for greater understanding of its subcomponents, while recognizing that the network of interactions between these sub-elements is just as important as the individual elements. This allows for a wider encompassing understanding of how communal systems operate as a whole, which is a determining factor of how a community self-organizes to learn, cope with and respond to shock and stressors. Complex social systems self-organize to respond to shocks or stresses by proactively minimizing exposure (vulnerability), absorbing and coping with the shock, or by reorganizing -transforming structures or linkages within the communal system. This differentiates it from current assessment methods by understanding the chain reaction of a number of smaller system failures that contribute to prolonged stress and make shocks acutely more damaging.

Research Methodology Literature review A literature review was undertaken to provide a generalized knowledge base on the specific obstacles and opportunities for household and community resilience to food insecurity in the face of drought and conflict in the Sahel. The research targeted formal and grey literature, which were captured and processed through retrieval, screening, evidence assessment, and analysis. These methods were key in providing an academic basis for analysis and subsequent tool development while remaining flexible between established fields of thought and a new and expanding group of literature of findings from fieldwork and development research.

Systems Based Community Assessment Methodology The community assessment tool was developed to better understand social capital’s relationship to resilience as conceptualized in the FtF Framework. Specifically, the tool was used to identify kinds and uses of social capital, which is recognized as a vital aspect of communal resilience by both Mercy Corps and the FtF Framework. The relationships within a system and those connecting it to outside systems are represented by bonding, bridging, and linking social capital and were prioritized for the purposes of the exercise. This is not an exhaustive measure of these elements of social capital, but offers a general overview of communal organization as it pertains to promotion of resilience to identified shocks and stressors.

Focus Group Discussions (FDGs) served as the primary data collection and community interaction mechanism for the Systems-Based Community Assessment Tool. However, this tool was not used in

6 isolation: triangulation through a literature review and key informant interviews were done to enhance validity of findings. Key informant interviews with field staff and partner organizations were useful for rapid “ground-truthing” of findings from the literature review including important contextual complexities faced by target communities, facilitating access to study sites, and a general outline of the community structure and greater socio-ecological systems. This allowed the research team to focus more discussion and analysis on the systems’ reactions to shock and stress.

Figure 2: Focus Group Discussions Adult Male Adult Female Male Youth Female Youth Niger 2 2 1 1 Mali 3 3 2 2

In three of five targeted communities in Niger and Mali, four focus groups were conducted, resulting in a total of five adult male groups, five adult women groups, three male youth groups, and three female youth groups, resulting in six FGDs in Niger and ten FGDs in Mali. Participants were gathered by field program staff and/or community mobilizers, which can itself present a biased sample that may not be representative of the entire community. For instance, herders were consistently underrepresented and mobilization was in a short timeframe, limiting those available to participate, often to powerful community members or contact points.

To set the stage for a fluid conversation surrounding the mapping of social capital and how it may have changed due to shocks or stresses, participants were first asked to identify and prioritize primary events or factors that have impacted the community in the last five years. These events are assumed to be the primary shocks or stresses impacting the community. A 3-step participatory process (see Annex 6) was used to generate a model of the perceived community structure, market linkages, and resource management practices. Participants were asked to define the events and characterize the importance and nature of the bonding, bridging, and linking relationships throughout the exercise both in time of reference (“normal”) and times of identified shock or stress to better understand absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities of the target communities.

Field work in Niger was spent in the Niamey country office and Filingue and Maradi field offices, focusing considerable effort on defining a systems approach and tool development in close coordination with staff. The first pilot tests of the tool were completed in Tarkassa, a small remote village outside of Filingue, and a village near the commercial center of Maradi. In Mali, three communities were chosen and prioritized for their accessibility and recent history of food insecurity due to the effects of drought and conflict. Djombo Djeneke, situated in the middle of the country outside of Mopti, was severely food insecure and noticeably more resource poor than the other study sites. The two southern communities of Sinsina and Koyan lie within 35 kilometers of Bamako: Koyan is located close to a military base and demonstrated a higher awareness and more acute effects of the 2012 coup, while Sinsina is closer to the main highway and had the most access to markets and resources of the three sites.

The development of the systems-based tool was founded in an understanding that “problems” like a food crises are the result of a number of smaller system failures, in response to a shock and the result of long-term, lower level stresses on the system and its environment. By mapping the different groups within a system and their social capital, the ebb and flow of power and vulnerability during time of reference and time of crisis can help identify leverage points for intervention. Furthermore, the exercise allows development and humanitarian actors to understand the system-wide effects of interventions, which may result in more resilience for one group at the expense of another. For instance, does empowering a women- only group that provides credit and work sharing within the community disempower chiefs’ assistants who

7 are an important conflict mitigation and management structure? The tool aids the conceptualization of these systemic effects of interventions that seek to bolster the entire system’s resilience.

Limitations of methodology While our definition of agro-pastoralist communities is not all-encompassing, this tool allows allow for analysis of both agriculture and pastoralism in communities and these groups’ social capital. This led the research team to a deeper understanding of the intricacies and situational complexities that are many times brought under the umbrella of “agro-pastoralist,” but this definition should be closely examined for each context in which the tool is used. The findings were heavily influenced by a number of factors present during focus group discussions and during analysis. Limitations on women and girls’ participation were tangible: the presence of male authority figures from the community, the time of day, and the gender of the facilitator were factors that influenced data gathered. In almost all groups, older participants either dominated or heavily influenced discussions

Findings

The findings are derived from evidence collected from select communities in Niger and Mali. However, the validity of these findings is also rooted in the wider scope of a previously conducted literature review which investigated the state of resilience to food insecurity of agro-pastoralists in the West African Sahel.

Shocks and Stressors The main negative event named by each community was drought leading to food crisis (henceforth to be referred to as drought), which created a struggle for both animals and people. This was characterized by a lack of and irregular rain over consecutive years, leading to reduced yields which fail to meet subsistence level-consumption needs and have historically led to price hikes of staple cereals. It also reduces water for animals, household use, and dry-season farming. Communities also mentioned intermittent disease outbreaks including malaria, dysentery, and diarrheal episodes, which disproportionately affect more vulnerable groups such as children (primary effect), and weaken the entire system (secondary effect) because people are less mobile and productive if their kids are sick. Women in both southern communities in Mali also mentioned the negative impact of the lack of trees due to deforestation. One community in Mali and both communities in Niger also identified flooding as a major shock in their villages. Crop pests such as locust infestations and irregular rain patters were also shocks identified by the communities in Niger.

Conflict-related stresses were largely not found in the communities studied. The research team proactively included questions about the 2012 coup in Mali and farmer-herder conflict so to facilitate this analysis, but these shocks and stresses were not prioritized by communities during FGDs. Women in both Southern communities in Mali talked relatively openly about the political crisis in 2012. Men said this had no effect on a number of occasions once overtly asked about the event, while women described its negative impact on the entire community, including reduced access to markets and restricted movement which were a hindrance to sustaining livelihoods,.

Community Groups and Linkages The literature review conducted and subsequent field visits evidenced agro-pastoral communities in the Western Sahel as mostly sedentary groups organized into communities made up of multiple households and comprised of extended family groups. They maintain intricate resource management practices that aim to balance farming and herding livelihoods to ensure adequate means for subsistence. Farming represents their main livelihood practice, accounting for anywhere between 70-80%4 of their income generating activities.

4 As reported by focus group discussion participants. 8

Animal herding represents an important secondary livelihood mechanism. Agriculture tends to be divided into large cash crop cereals (millet, sorghum, etc.), high value vegetable fields, and an increasing number of off-season community subsistence gardens. Understanding how different community groups are affected differently by the same shock or stress is important in understanding agro-pastoralist systems’ abilities to adapt and transform in the face of shocks.

All of the villages identified farmers, merchants, and herders as the most important groups in the community. Farmers represented virtually the entirety of the community and had the largest number of general links with all other groups, ensuring their position in the center of the community. Merchants, on the other hand, had the strongest trade links within the communities, which include buying and selling of goods, as well as the provision of credit to community members. Despite all community groups reporting ownership of animals, herders were identified as those who possess larger herds requiring localized grazing routes, with larger transhumance movements being less common. Other community groups included artisans and functional community groups such as cooperatives and women’s groups, which also act as sources of credit.

In Niger, herders reported having dynamic relationships with farmers, which includes buying and selling of agricultural goods, and cooperative relations for grazing land use. This last linkage can often result in tensions during the rainy season as animal herds can encroach on farmland and destroy crops.

Market access is critical in rural communities. Across the communities, merchants go to the market most often and thus constitute the largest amount bridging capital, i.e. the links that communities have with surrounding communities. Vegetable farmers also go to the market and interact with other villages frequently. Women in Mali are said to go to markets and other nearby villages more than men, whether for buying and selling or social reasons. Farmers and herders in Mali go to market the least, consuming the vast majority of their harvest and thus having little to sell. In Niger, these groups tended to go to more specialized market spaces, such as livestock markets. The markets in Niger were also identified as key forums for social interaction as well as dissemination of information such as market prices or community initiatives. Other forms of bridging capital that herders have include exchange relationships with outside farmers, such as selling manure for fertilizer.

Resource Management Communities mainly identified institutional resources and infrastructure such as schools, mosques, clinics, and banks. Hand pumps, land, and schools were identified as the most important resources by the communities studied. While land for farming tends to be private, village chiefs and their advisors facilitate the arbitration of any disputes regarding land use or encroachment instead of the owners themselves.

Water was a highly valued resource, whether through public (wells or hand pumps) or private access. The management committees for these water resources included women, however their level of participation was difficult to gauge outside of a 50% representation. When asked about management of institutional structures, school, clinic, and Islamic school committees were identified in both countries. Overall, community satisfaction with committees was high and very little, if any, critique of these structures was mentioned. The clinic committees had a gender-balanced structure, but there were obvious imbalances in committee members’ participation and influence. Women cleaned and maintained the clinic daily, but the men met separately each week, only including women in monthly meetings where women were unable to exercise influence over decisions about staff salary and stocking medicines.

Social Capital and Resilience Capacities As discussed earlier, the Feed the Future (FtF) conceptual framework was adopted as a foundation for creating a tool to help determine the social capital and resilience capacities of systems through focus group discussions.

The bonding social capital that contributes to absorptive capacities -- that is, reactive coping mechanisms based on “The bonding social capital that relationships within the community -- in the Sahel consists contributes to absorptive capacities -- of informal community-based risk sharing mechanisms that is, reactive coping mechanisms based on trust, community cohesion, solidarity, and other based on relationships within the intangible elements of community organization. Credit community -- in the Sahel consists of mechanisms emerge as an essential coping strategy informal community-based risk sharing throughout each of the sampled communities. Although mechanisms based on trust, community more formal credit mechanisms exist, the primary source of cohesion, solidarity, and other credit tends to be merchants. Credit can take the form of intangible elements of community production loans used to purchase supplies necessary for organization.” income generating activities or in-kind consumable products, like food. Secondly, individuals and groups may participate in resource sharing, management, and solidarity mechanisms, such as food stock management, labor sharing in women’s gardens and other farming activities, and sharing resources with vulnerable community members. Finally, a critical component to this resilience capacity is the dissemination of critical information. In the participating communities, this has included awareness raising for health and sanitation efforts, the promotion of disease mitigation strategies, and the organization of community response mechanisms.

The bridging social capital that promotes absorptive capacities, which are coping mechanisms that manifest though relationships between distinct communities, in the region tend to be very limited because villages interact with other villages in close proximity with very similar if not identical environmental and political conditions. This is particularly true for drought, which affects large geographic areas rather than a specific location or lone community. However, resources from community to community can differ, which provides an opening for communities to share resources and take advantage of the resources of their neighbors. For example, in Mali, outside individuals and groups were reported to visit the clinic in Sinsina village and people came from nearby villages to take advantage of Djombo Djeneke’s larger farming cooperative’s services. Regionally, in times of drought, groups may travel to more distant markets to gain access to external credit options, to sell their animals or products, or to sell their services to a broader market. In times of extreme need, young men migrate for employment purposes, either to national hubs such as capital cities or regional hubs, which entail crossing national borders.

Proactive coping mechanisms that manifested through formalized networks in the community -- linking social capital that promotes absorptive capacities -- were primarily through formal community based risk- sharing mechanisms including women’s groups, cooperatives, village savings and loan associations (VSLAs), and post-production management options such as cereal banks. These mechanisms reduce vulnerability by pooling response capacities across different groups within the community, creating formal structures to cope with the effects of recurrent shocks and stressors. Other community based organizations activate during times of crisis, such as a women’s land committee in Mali that reported spreading manure and compost on fields to increase moisture retention in the soil during periods of drought, and a school committee that negotiates school fees and teacher salaries when families’ resources are more strained. Finally, at a local government level in Niger, people pay taxes to the district which in turn offers specialized services to assist communities in times of need.

The bonding social capital that supports adaptive capacities was reflected in the adoption of proven practices for communal well-being that were facilitated by close relationships between community members. In Mali, for example, the adoption of bed nets to prevent malaria was a result of the trusting relationship between community members and the local health staff. Farmers in the region also entrust their animals to herders - such as the Fulani in Niger who have historically participated in long-range grazing

10 circuits - for transhumance. This resilience capacity is contingent on the level of trust present between community groups. The linking social capital for adaptive capacities were very limited, as few to no formal response mechanisms were in place. Village resource management structures and political leadership such as the chiefs and their staff did not actively promote well-coordinated community response strategies. Community members readily admitted their limited functionality in this capacity and pointed to their lack of resources as a root cause of this inadequacy. The few examples of proactive strategies in advance of a shock that manifested through formalized institutions included infrastructure investment and maintenance in a community clinic and water hand pumps. Additionally, there was an example of a school committee reaching out to the district mayor’s office to advocate necessary resources.

The bridging social capital contributing to transformative capacities was also very limited as described by FGD participants in the communities. Marriages between members of different communities came up multiple times as a practice that strengthens social bonds. This also increased the level of economic exchange activities and other resource exchange links between communities.

The bridging social capital that contributed to adaptive capacities and linked social capital for transformative capacities were not evident in the sampled communities. The selected communities have social and economic ties with other systems, but they share many of the same environmental and livelihood structures, problems and obstacles as the wide geographic impact of prevalent shocks and stressors such as drought plays a formative role in this reality. Therefore the sharing of good practices or livelihood diversification is not prevalent. Exposure to new models and experiences is mainly driven by national and international NGOs. The only example that was provided was the “Nigeriens for Niger” program, which promotes the creation of community dry-season gardens on public land. These are growing in popularity, and for some communities have become the primary coping mechanism for subsistence food production during the lean season. Although characterized as a positive step and popular program, this program stood alone as an example of transformative capacity along institutional lines in the communities surveyed. In fact, women in a Malian village expressed frustration in this regard as they described their desire to create and enforce a policy against cutting down the trees in their immediate vicinity. The deforestation occurring has adverse affects on their lives, yet they feel powerless and disconnected from the formal structures which could enact their desired changes.

Conclusions

● Informal bonding linkages that lend to absorptive capacities represented the most robust set of coping mechanisms in the face of recurring shocks and stresses present in the participating communities. Credit relationships emerge as one of, if not the most important coping mechanism as identified. Access to credit is vital to facilitating a series of other coping strategies such as the purchase of productive materials, access to food items or medicine, and even to finance the cost of migration. ● The research revealed minimal evidence of adaptive and transformative capacities, leading to minimal resilience to food insecurity. Communities employ many absorptive coping mechanisms, but those are used for survival. Many times, these same coping mechanisms do not augment or contribute to resilience, but rather erode or degrade their long-term and short-term resilience, both at the household and community level. Communities lack the resources and assets to build these capacities without outside assistance: these systems are already so weak that in the face of recurrent drought they are unable to demonstrate resilience capacities. ● One of the most evident trends is the lack of transformative capacities across all communities. The research revealed minimal effort on the part of national and local governments as well as NGOs to facilitate the creation of greater transformative capacities. Rather, current efforts are primarily focused addressing end-result needs of system failures (such as the provision of food aid), creating a

bias towards the promotion of absorptive and adaptive capacities. This may be a contributing factor to the ineffectiveness of NGO or government programming that failed to address the systemic failures, and continue year after year to target these end-result needs. ● Women and youth groups were distinct in their views of their communities and thus provided valuable insight to inequalities within the systems. Women had a much more complex perception of the social organization of their communities, whereas men had a much more economic and production- based perspective. Women’s limited access to land (and subsequent inability to secure land tenure) limited the range of viable coping mechanisms they could employ. Finally, women were generally more willing to talk about conflict and tensions between inter-communal groups, whereas men consciously avoided the topic. The male youth in communities in which migration was prevalent expressed feelings of disenfranchisement and exclusion, while female youth reflected these conditions without naming them. ● Communities tend to experience a persistence of shocks and stressors, which systematically degrades the communities’ capacity to absorb, respond to, and recover from shocks.

Implementation of the Methodology: While this tool was useful for to understand the effects of stresses such as drought, which has no clear human “perpetrator,” this tool is not believed to be very effective for drawing out the complexities and sensitivities related to conflict. There is need for considerable revision for use in conflict scenarios. This tool will likely prove more useful in communities in which Mercy Corps does not have ongoing projects, as it offers a rapid assessment mechanism to identify viable points for program intervention by providing a snapshot of the social capital and resilience capacities in time of reference and during shock. The tool provides a summary of social composition of the community as well as for identifying strengths and gaps of the capacities these communities use to cope with the shocks and stressors that degrade their resilience. A systems approach can serve to effectively identify trigger points and systemic failures which provides a more useful starting point for better targeted programming by revealing root causes of recurrent systemic problems. For a true systems approach to be implemented, this tool should be one part of a much broader toolkit that includes economic, environmental, political, and other areas of analysis. Existing Mercy Corps tools such as HEAs, VCAs, and the gender and conflict assessments can be synthesized to provide a wider encompassing systemic analysis in lieu of a formal systems toolkit.

A system’s approach to assess resilience to food insecurity can aid in identifying the strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities already existent within communities to create more secure, productive, just, and resilient societies. As Mercy Corps pushes to be at the forefront of promoting resilience within the Sahel, it is hoped that this methodology and tool can aid in identifying ever more effective leverage points for intervention.

Annexes

Annex 1: What is a Systems Approach?

As the first of its four Resilience Principles, Mercy Corps recognizes that a systems approach is necessary to understand complex, dynamic social groups. Such groups are often characterized by intricate networks of social, environmental, economic, political and other factors that determine communal organization. Understanding the inner workings of these complex social systems requires identifying and evaluating how interrelated components interact. Hence, the value of a systems approach is its’ ability to break down highly complex systems, allowing for greater understanding of its subcomponents, while recognizing that the network of interactions between these sub elements is just as important as the individual elements. The approach also offers a novel perspective for addressing communal needs be recognizing that these needs result from breakdowns in the community system network as a whole. By addressing the system failures, programing can promote communal organization to proactively prevent the failures rather than targeting repetitive end result needs year after year.

A system is composed of interrelated parts or components. These parts can be people, institutions, infrastructure and environment, as well as the formal and informal structures that govern and manage them. In the case of social systems, these have boundaries that are defined by the observer for purposes of analysis (i.e. a country, a town, a community or only part of a community), which can be thought of as “zooming” in or out in perspective. A system is also bound in time in the sense that observed characteristics may only be constant for the chosen time of observation. This is particularly important in highly dynamic social systems, which can change drastically at different points in time (i.e. communal organization of agro pastoralist during the rainy season versus during a period of drought).

Another vital aspect is that all systems are made up of smaller, interacting subsystems, while also forming part of a larger encompassing system. Social systems tend not to be mutually exclusive and system boundaries will certainly overlap. For instance, a small agro-pastoralist community is itself a social system, but it is also made up of smaller, overlapping communal groups (subsystems) such as merchants, herders, farmers, village savings and loans groups, and so on. Simultaneously, the agro-pastoralist community is also part of a larger social system that may include intervening and interacting elements such as governance and market structures. As we “zoom out”, we see larger encompassing systems, like regional markets influencing our small village system.

A system consists of processes that transform inputs into outputs. A system receives input from, and sends output into, the wider environment. It should be noted that systems are neither linear nor static: within a system, each sub-system has its own level of resilience or equilibrium. Therefore, the promotion of resilience for a system at large (i.e. at state-level) may marginalize resilience at the local level, with the obvious corollary that promoting resilience at a smaller, local level or for specific subsystems may undermine resilience at a state level (Anderies and Martin-Breen, 2011). Conversely, promoting resilience at a local level does not always lead to increased resilience at the national level and vice versa.

To sum up, a systems approach is recognized as an effective mechanism to structure assessment of communal resilience by promoting comprehensive analysis of both communal composition as well as social, environmental and other linkages and interactions.

Annex 2: Social Capital vs. Capacities Matrix

Systems-Based Community Assessment Tool Communal Capacities – Social Capital Analysis Matrix5

Scope: Regional – West African Sahel Bonding Social Capital Bridging Social Capital Linking Social Capital

Absorptive Community-based risk - Sharing resources between - Community-based risk Capacity sharing mechanisms communities: sharing (formal): (informal): a. Other communities use clinic a. Community based a. Provision of credit by in Sinsina (Mali) organizations (i.e. women’s community merchants groups, coops, VSLAs) b. Credits in kind (food - Market Interaction b. Post production products to be paid off a. Access to external credit management (cereal banks later) are extremely markets/sources (Ex. Other Niger) important communities use cooperative in c. Credits for production Djombo Djeneke for credit - Community-based (cash for supplies (Mali)) (Farmers sometimes organizations that activate in necessary for production borrow money from migrants response to disasters: for farmers and artisans) when they run out of food, so a. Women’s land committee are also of great importance the credit link goes both ways spreads compost on fields to d. Credit links between (since the farmers finance the keep moisture in during migrants and farmers or migrant’s traveling) (Niger)). drought (Mali) merchants - first line of b. Travel to further markets for b. School committee provides credit for young men to animal and other product sales community members with migrate (Niger) (Ex. herders have a place to sell voice and leverage in time of of animals, merchants still have food crisis by negotiating - Community-based access to outside markets, and school fees and teacher dissemination of critical service workers can find more salaries so the school can stay information: business outside of their own open (preserving human a. Awareness-raising for system) capital, business continuity) malaria mitigation: c. Sale of animals (there is an covering latrines, bed net important pushback to doing - District level local usage this because animals represent government services b. School committees going social status, and during times a. People pay taxes to the to families in time of of crisis the prices of animals department/district at the sickness to take their kids tend to plummet. So people will market  tax base influences to clinic sometimes prefer to take the how much services are c. Community health clinic chance of not selling their provided (Niger) (where present) animals) d. Sometimes herders are - Livelihood unable to sell, so they leave diversification animals with a third party at the a. Opportunistic livelihood market who sells them (and expansion (ex. during the profits) which avoids having to

5 Analysis matrix taken from the Feed the Future Learning Agenda “Community Resilience: Conceptual Framework and Measurement”

14 wet season when the ponds take animals back to the village are high, nearly all young at a loss (plus the animals can people supplement by be held and fattened up) fishing → fish are sold e. Labor for cash within the community, not through markets in Niger) b. Women engaging in - Migration small scale income a. Migration of young men to generating activities send back money c. Merchants become the primary generators of employment. Most people in the community will go to work with merchants to transport food to market and other activities in exchange for cash.

Resource Sharing and Solidarity Mechanisms a. Extended families help each other and depend on solidarity. b. Some farmers will sell a little product directly within the community and bypass the market c. Well-diggers digging out wells for free in drought/food crisis (Mali) d. There is an expected charity/alms (“zakat”), from higher income groups to poor and vagabonds (Niger) e. Work sharing (women’s gardens, farmers helping other farmers with weeding/plowing, lending animals for farm work) f. Transportation by coop (Mali) g. Household food stock management, and sharing with extended family groups (Niger)

Adaptive Capacity - Close relationships NOTE: these communities have NOTE: the village resource between community social and economic ties with management structures and members facilitates other systems, but they share political leadership such as the adoption of proven many of the same village chiefs and their staff practices for communal environmental and livelihood are not actively promoting wellbeing: structures, problems and well-coordinated community a. Adoption of using bed obstacles. Therefore the response strategies in the nets for malaria prevention sharing of good practices or villages surveyed. FGD (trust of nurses/clinic) livelihood diversification are participants, many of who b. Farmers give their not prevalent. Exposure to new were members of these formal animals to herders to take models and experiences is community structures readily them out to pasture, and mainly driven by national and admitted their limited pay for this service in kind international NGOs. functionality in this capacity. (through food). c. Islamic association and - Infrastructure investment: village chief facilitating a. Clinic: built, maintained, community response staff, and equipped by the (Niger) community. b. Hand pump: built by outside NGOs, but maintained by communal, locally-elected committee - Government accountability mechanisms a. School committee advocated with mayor’s office on behalf of community re: school’s needs

Transformative NOTE: Bonding social - Relationships forged to - Policies informed by Capacity capital is by nature solely realize one community representative participation existent within a system function can be applied to of different community and does not link or bridge other functions: sectors: vertically to a higher a. Marriages between a. Women expressed desire to community structure. communities during normal have law against cutting down Therefore, it cannot have times strengthens safety net in trees to mitigate deforestation transformative capacities. times of need and further down – lack of political will to create the line expand exchange and enforce this policy has led relationships (more bridging to continued deforestation. capital) - Government sponsored coping strategies a. Implementation of community off season gardens for subsistence consumption (promoted by Gov. in “Nigerians for Niger Program”)

Annex 3: Feed the Future Resilience Framework6

6 Extracted from the Feed the Future Community Resilience Conceptual Framework and Measurement (2013). 17

Annex 4: Mali Country Report

Introduction The Capstone research was conducted in Mali from March 9-22, 2014. The group conducted ten focus group discussions (FGDs) in three villages. This report provides information about the villages visited and summarizes the major findings of the FGDs. The FGDs focused on the effects of stresses and shocks such as drought and conflict on the social capital and resilience of communities.

Three sites were chosen for their location and accessibility: one village outside of Mopti and two villages within two hours of Bamako represented diverse levels of food security and experiences with drought and conflict. Stakeholders in Mopti relayed that Djombo Djeneke, a Dogon Village approximately one hour from Mopti and situated in the middle of the country in a noticeably drier climate, was not only a place of severe food deficit, but also a historic recipient of food aid. Although not markedly further from markets than the other two villages, the levels of food insecurity were more acute in Djombo Djeneke. Koyan lies outside of Kati, approximately 2 hours Northwest of Bamako. Sinsina, outside of Sanankoroba (Southeast of Bamako) was closest to the capital, and had more resources than the other two communities, including agricultural assistance programs and food aid.

Mercy Corps Mali leadership, including the Regional Resilience Advisor and Country Director, were instrumental in the completion of this field study. Future field staff will utilize the tool created to better understand resilience and community systems in villages where they work. The ten FGDs completed using the tool are a continuation of a field test done in Niger earlier this year. A number of situational and methodological biases limit the findings of the Mali research. While the FGDs were participatory, in some instances the location and/or presence of village leaders influenced the conversation. This was most noticeable for both male and female youth FGDs: older participants dominated conversations or spoke authoritatively on matters, limiting full participation of younger members. Gender lessons learned have been compiled and include emphasis on time, location, and method of gathering participants as key success factors for women’s and female youth FGDs in Mali. In addition, members of resource management committees tended to be present during all FGDs, possibly limiting critiques of them.

Key Findings The following findings are illustrative of how shocks and stresses affect the bonding, bridging, and linking of social capital of communities, affecting resilience as measured by absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. Participant groups identified both acute shocks and recurrent, seemingly lower- level stresses as having major impacts on their villages. While a village may be more visibly affected by a shock such as a coup d’état, the cumulative effects of stresses such as drought or malaria - which weaken the village system’s ability to withstand a shock - may be far greater.

Shocks and Stressors The main event named by each community was drought leading to food crisis (henceforth to be referred to as drought), which created a struggle for both animals and people. This was characterized by a lack of and irregular rain over consecutive years, leading to reduced yields, fodder, and water for animals, less water for household use and dry-season farming, and price spikes. All of the communities also mentioned malaria and disease, which disproportionately affect children (primary effect), and weaken the entire system (secondary effect) because people are less mobile and productive if their kids are sick. Women in both southern communities talked relatively openly about the 2012 coup d’etat and its effect, while men said this has no effect whatsoever on a number of occasions once overtly asked about the event. Women directly questioned about the coup described its negative impact on the entire community and the system’s well being (access to markets, movement, etc). However, young women were not even aware the coup occurred in Koyan. Women in both southern communities also mentioned the lack of trees due to deforestation and its negative impact on their lives.

Bonding Capital Each of the villages identified farmers, merchants, and herders as the most important groups in the community. Farmers, which include dry season vegetable producers, represented virtually the entirety of the community and had the largest number of relationships, or links, with all other groups. Merchants, on the other hand, have the strongest exchange links, defined as relationships based on the exchange of goods and/or services, in the community, which include buying and selling, as well as the provision of credit. Despite all community groups reporting ownership of animals, herders are identified as those who possess larger herds requiring localized grazing routes, with larger transhumance movements being less common. Other community groups included artisans such as blacksmiths and functional community groups such as cooperatives and women’s groups known as tontines.

Economic exchange, including buying, selling, trading, and bartering, is often the basis for links, or relationships, between community groups. Farming represents the primary economic activity for the community. Farmers and vegetable farmers are also many times the same group, but both were prioritized groups during FGDs. Herders have a dynamic relationship with both groups of farmers, which includes buying and selling of agricultural goods and cooperative relations for grazing land use. This relationship can become tense during the rainy season when animal herds encroach on farmland and destroy crops and again in the dry season when encroaching occurs on vegetable fields. This is of particular importance as dry-season vegetable farming was the most prominent form of food security in times of drought. The collective commercial action of the cooperative and the tontine, or women’s informal cooperative groups, provided communities access to credit in times of need. While community members prefer not to buy things on credit, it is the most prevalent coping mechanism. It is recognized by community members that price fluctuations are a result of larger country-level trends and not exploitative or predatory on the part of merchants, thus it does not damage bonds that rely on exchange relationships. These relationships could be seen as getting stronger, but it should be recognized that these are tense relationships, especially in the case of recurrent drought when repayment can be delayed indefinitely.

Bridging Social Capital Across the communities, merchants go to the market most often and thus have the largest amount bridging capital. Vegetable farmers also go to the market and interact with other villages frequently. Women are said to go to markets and other nearby villages more than men, whether for buying and selling or social reasons. Farmers and herders go to market the least, consuming the vast majority of their harvest and thus having little to sell. The bridging relationships farmers and herders have are often weakened by drought. Herders only go to the market to sell animals which tend to be sold primarily during times of stress as a coping mechanism. Other forms of bridging social capital that herders have include exchange relationships with outside farmers, such as selling manure for fertilizer.

Cooperatives tend to be a major bridging force for local communities by providing transportation to and from local markets, credit, and other services that draw outside groups from nearby communities. However, the tontine, a village-level women’s group, acts as a work-share, credit, and lending mechanism, and is a more internal structure and does not have bridging capacities like the cooperative. For instance, the soap made by the tontine is sold within the system and not to outside groups. Masons, mechanics, and others whose bridging exchange relationships are based on the selling of services often rely on these links during times of drought. Their search for business beyond their villages increases their bridging capital.

While drought affects these bridging relationships by increasing groups’ interactions or by weakening the relationship through decreased contact or exchange, merchants continue to bring goods to their communities from outside markets in times of drought. Women still maintained social relationships in other villages during times of drought or conflict, but they also reported a significant decrease in the level interaction. During the coup, for example, women reported not going to Kati or Sanankoroba for almost a

19 year, temporarily severing many links. Herders’ bridging social capital is also weakened during rainy season as encroachment, or allowing large animals to pass over and/or eat farmers’ crops, on other communities’ lands becomes more prevalent. None of the communities reported that this had ever escalated to inter-communal violence, explaining that communal dispute resolution has been effective to dispel tensions.

Linking Capital Communities mainly identified institutional resources and infrastructure such as schools, mosques, clinics, a bank, and mechanical grinders. Hand pumps, land and, schools were identified as the most important resources by the communities studied. While land for farming tends to be private, village chiefs and their assistants facilitate the management of this resource. In Djombo Djeneke, a land committee was mentioned that is made up of women who spread compost over fields to maintain moisture in the soil, mitigating the effects of drought. The management committees were also explained to be the arbiters of any small-scale conflict arising, however infrequently, both within and between communities.

Water was a highly valued resource, whether through public or private access. Public access was mainly through a public well in the North, while hand pumps were extremely important to the southern communities. The management committees for these water resources included women, however their level of participation was difficult to gauge outside of a 50% representation within the structure. These committees were not affected by the identified and stresses, but their responsibility to maintain, clean, and regulate access to the infrastructures was seen as effective.

Overall, community satisfaction with committees was high and very little, if any, critique of these structures was mentioned. When asked about management of institutional structures, one school and one clinic committee were identified. The clinic committee had a gender-balanced structure, but there were clear imbalances in members’ participation and influence. Women cleaned and maintained the clinic daily, and the men met separately each week, only including women in monthly meetings in which women were unable to influence decisions about staff salary and stocking medicines. The youth performed educational outreach in Sinsina on behalf of the clinic, advising people to cover latrines to mitigate against malaria. This was the only identified community action capacity shown by youth in the selected communities. The school committee liaised with local governance to advocate for the school’s needs, and negotiated school fees and teacher salaries during drought so children were able to attend even in times of financial distress.

Conclusion These communities lack substantial resilient capacities. They have many coping mechanisms, but mostly for survival. Many times, these same coping mechanisms don’t contribute to resilience, but rather erode or degrade their current long-term and short-term resilience, both at the household and community level. These systems are already so weak that communities can’t do much in the face of drought to show resilience capacities. They lack the resources and assets to build and utilize these capacities. The research revealed minimal evidence of critical resilience capacities to food insecurity.

The food crisis was noticeably more intense in Djombo Djeneke compared to the southern communities, seemingly due to more limited access to water and an inability to rely on vegetable farming during the dry season. Vegetable farming is the most important coping mechanism across the communities and impacts all other forms of social capital that are reduced/weakened during drought. Food crisis-induced migration, or sending children to live and work with family or in Bamako, was also an issue mentioned exclusively in Djombo Djeneke. This indicates the necessity of more extreme measures as coping mechanisms.

Distinctions between values and perspectives across genders were drawn from FGD analysis, as separate discussions took place with adult males, adult females, young adult males, and young adult females. Women had a more complex perception of the social organization of their communities, whereas men had a more

20 economic perspective. Each group tended to perceive community organization as it pertained to their specific demographic’s needs. In addition, women’s inability to own land limited their range of viable coping mechanisms. Finally, women were generally more willing to talk about conflict and tensions between intercommunal groups, whereas men consciously avoided the conversation.

These villages experience a persistence of shocks and stresses within their systems, draining resources and thereby degrading the communities’ ability to build transformative capacities. This increases the villages’ vulnerability, making it more difficult to absorb, respond to, and recover from shocks.

Annex 5: Niger Country Report

Introduction The Capstone research was conducted in Niger from January 6-25, 2014. After consultation with Niger Country Office staff and with the Sahel Regional Resilience Advisor, the research team developed a Systems-Based Community Assessment tool to gauge agro-pastoral communities’ existing social capital and the role of said social capital in promoting resilience in the face of shocks and stresses. The team spent two weeks in conjunction with the M&E Officer from the Niger Country Office and Mercy Corps field staff from the Filingue and Maradi offices field testing the tool in two communities in which Mercy Corps currently has programming. The primary objectives of these focus group discussions were to characterize the agro-pastoralist system and to assess existing social capital. Training sessions for use of the systems based community assessment tool were organized with both Filingué and Maradi field staff. The FGDs were complemented by key informant interviews with Mercy Corps field staff, who provided invaluable feedback on the uses of the tool as well as contextualizing information. This report provides information about the field based research undertaken two regions in Niger and summarizes the major findings of focus group discussions.

Tarkassa, a community of 500 approximately 10km from the Filingue field office in Tillabury department, was chosen for the first field test due to its proximity to the Filingue office, relative ease of access, and the familiarity of the Filingue staff with the community. Mercy Corps’s Wadata project has been working in the area for approximately 5 years. A small community of approximately 2,500 people located about 10km outside of the commercial hub of Maradi near Niger’s southern border was chosen as the second FGD site for its relative ease of access and proximity to the Maradi field office.

Biases and Limitations This report provides an overview of general findings from two Nigerien communities and is in no way exhaustive. While FDGs were participatory, in some instances freedom of discussion was limited by the presence of community elders, who had a silencing effect on younger FDG participants. The methodology developed by the research team was meant to gauge social capital as a contributing factor for resilience. Hence, the assessment is not meant the analyze the large number of other factors the impact resilience. Finally, due to the limited length of stay in the field, communities that were familiar to field staff and where Mercy Corps programming is currently present, were chosen - possibly resulting in a case bias.

Key Findings The following key findings are illustrative of how shocks and stresses affect the bonding, bridging, and linking social capital within and between communities, thus affecting resilience as measured by the absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities of a given community.

Participant groups identified both acute shocks and recurrent, seemingly lower-level stresses as having major impacts in their villages. It is important to note that while a community may be more visibly affected by a large, rapid onset shock, the cumulative effects of recurrent stresses may be far greater. Although communities mentioned multiple events in the past 5 years, except for illness, all events identified resulted in critical food shortages. These events included recurrent droughts, changing rain patterns, recurrent flooding, and irregular rain patterns during the rainy season. All the climate-related effects primarily impact agricultural production - communities are critically dependent on near-subsistence-level farming yields - minimal variations in crop yields can severely impact communal food security.

Primary adaptive practices identified by the surveyed communities include reduced food consumption, increased dependence on community subsistence gardens and selling of animals, amongst others. Ineffective resource management and critical resource constraints are key determinants in resulting food crisis (generally identified as the primary event affecting communities), there are few/no participatory

22 mechanisms to gauge or promote shared communal response strategies around resource management.

Bonding Social Capital Livelihood practices emerged as the primary theme by which community groups identified. Farmers, herders, artisans and merchants were consistently identified as the main community groups; men often identified these as the only communal groups. Women and female youth on the other hand, revealed a much more extensive and detailed communal structure, identifying upwards of 20 community groups. These ranged from productive groups, to communal organizations, to socio-economic divisions, to village chief/administration group, to ethnic/tribal groups. This revealed and an evident difference in the perception of communal organization between men and women.

Agriculture was identified as the primary productive practice, with everyone in the community, including women and children, participating in a mix of wet-season cereal agriculture, high value vegetable farming, and dry-season (subsistence) agriculture. 100% of the community participates in wet-season agriculture, with slightly less in other forms in the off season. Slightly less important was herding, which included a substantial proportion of the population yet was indicated by both Maradi and Filingue focus groups as being only somewhat important.

Trade relations were identified as the most prevalent interactions between community groups. Farmers tended to have the most interactions with other groups. Credit-based interactions were cited as some of the most important to all community groups, of which merchants were the primary providers. They divided credit into two types (for consumption and for investment). As an example of investment credit, artisans might go to market and purchase the source materials for their products on credit, then sell their products and after profit they pay back the loan. Investment credit is the most common form of credit, and is vital to most subsistence income generation activities since few people do not have the cash flow to purchase necessary supplies. Consumption credit was explained as food sold on credit to be repaid in a given period.

During times of stress merchants become the most important group in the community. Because production in the form of agriculture disappears, eliminating the primary source of income, community members are forced to depend on merchants’ expanded networks and increased capital and they become the primary employers in the community. Farmers who ordinarily work their own land sell their labor to merchants. Additionally, in Maradi, young men identified migration as a primary method of coping, not only as a response to shock but also as an annual pilgrimage either to the city or across the border to Nigeria. During lean times in Filingue, communities observed that small-scale vegetable gardens tended primarily by women were essential to fill the nutritional gap in the lean season. The cereal banks also become extremely important as a post-production resource management mechanism.

Bridging capital Community members primarily visit markets for either trade or social reasons. In both communities, multiple markets existed and were visited by nearly all identified community groups, except herders, who tended to only visit specific animal markets. Men primarily identified financial interactions with the market, while women often also identified social links, such as communicating news or receiving medical consultations. All productive groups use the market as their primary means of selling their products, buying materials, and gathering information (for farmers about prices of agricultural products, for herders about animal prices).

The market can also be where credit is obtained from outside the community in the form of in-kind credit or credit for production (cash for supplies). Women may go to the market to sell small wares during the harvest season when there is a large stock to sell, but the majority of sales in markets are made by men. A total of eight markets were identified in Filingué and market days covered every day of the week except for Friday, meaning community attend markets almost on a daily basis. In Filingué, women in particular noted

23 that they visited the market expressly for paying taxes. Taxes were important because amount paid to the department would result in the corollary provision of services to the community.

In times of stress, as mentioned above, market links all but vanished. Farmers were unable to produce, leaving them with nothing to buy or sell and entirely reliant on merchants for credit. Men noted in Filingue that in bad harvest years, the merchants would buy what little was produced at a low price and then sell it back to the community at an inflated price.

Linking capital Linking social capital, which according to the FtF Framework takes the form of relationships between people and formalized institutions, was looked at through a lens of natural resource management in order to maintain the narrow geographic focus of each focus group discussion. The management structures were rated through “satisfaction” which was used as a proxy to identify their functionality and efficacy. However, in general, communities found fault not with the management structure, but with the availability or capacity of the resource. Communities often identified infrastructure such as wells, mosques, and schools and, accordingly, discussion then was focused on the management structures in place for these resources. All communities listed land and water resources first, before adding religious institutions, schools, and health clinics. Communities already had management committees in place for all named resources, although in some cases, such as the water well committee in Maradi, the committee was non-functional. When asked about conflict over reduced resources, either directly or indirectly, committees said they could not recall an intractable conflict; only one minor conflict that was resolved peaceably between neighbors in Filingue was mentioned.

Conclusion The communities studied overall tend to lack the full spectrum of communal capacities to make communities resilient to recurrent drought and food insecurity. Coping capacities are largely reactive to stressors, taking the form of community-based risk sharing through the provision of credit between people at the village or community level either in the form of direct cash loans for purchase or in-kind, such as food or labor. Minimal resources in daily life has meant that communities have been unable to organize community-level responses in advance of even a known, recurrent stress such as drought. The current nature of inadequate rainfall and the community’s subsequent coping mechanisms systematically degrades the communities’ capacity to absorb, respond to, and recover from shocks, eroding the potential for increased resilience.

Distinctions between the values and perspectives across genders were able to be drawn from the FGD analysis, as separate discussions took place with adult males, adult females, young adult males, and young adult females. Across the board, women had a much more complex perception of the social organization of their communities, whereas men had a much more economic perspective. Men were also found to be less willing to discuss tensions between groups in the villages, while both women and adolescent girls touched on the subject briefly. Second, each group tended to perceive community organization as it pertained to that specific demographic’s needs, such as youth in Maradi highlighting the pervasive annual migrant population or adolescent girls highlighting communal structures that support their livelihood such as the school, Koranic school, clinic, parent groups, etc.

Finally, it is important to note that the research methodology had initially been designed to also assess the effects of conflict, including large scale, intercommunal and intra communal, on communal resilience. Yet, the methodology failed to gather any significant information about the impacts of conflict or communal tensions. FGD participants did not identify conflict as a pertinent shock or stressor in their communities (both in Filingé and Maradi). It is possible that communities are not willing to cover such a topic in a three hour FGD. Further research is required to identify whether the methodology can be adapted to better assess communal tensions, or whether a different approach is necessary.

Annex 6: Field Research Guide for Systems-Based Community Assessment Tool

Introduction Mercy Corps has been working in West and Central Africa to enhance communities’ resilience by reducing the effects of natural resource constraints, chronic food insecurity, low levels of education, conflict, high unemployment, gender inequality and a disenfranchised youth population. The organization plans to articulate and implement regional and country strategies around the theme of resilience. The systems-based community assessment tool presented below seeks to advance understanding of communal resilience to shocks and stressors identified by target communities in Niger and Mali. The tool allows for further understanding of existing social capital – defined here as the functional structure of relationships between community groups – and communal response strategies, both recognized as essential aspects of communal resilience. It initially designed for use with agro-pastoral communities, but can be adapted for use in varying contexts.

This guide is to be used for the implementing the Systems-Based Community Assessment Tool. It should be used with the Systems-Based Community Assessment FGD Questionnaire.

Conceptual Framework The Feed the Future Community Resilience Conceptual Framework and Measurement is accepted as a guiding framework to assess community resilience. Mercy Corps’ Resilience Principle #1 states that communities, or “complex dynamic systems, require a systems approach” to understanding communities’ absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience capacities. The following community assessment tool was developed using a system’s approach to better understand social capital’s relationship with resilience in target communities as conceptualized in the FTF Framework. Specifically, the tool can be used to identify three kinds of social capital, which are recognized as a vital aspect of communal resilience by both Mercy Corps and the Feed the Future Framework. The following types of social capital have been thus been prioritized for the purposes of the exercise: bonding social capital is identified through the network of interactions between community groups; bridging social capital, which connects members of one community or group to other communities/groups, is identified through the market links and the External Group mapping exercise; and finally, linking social capital which is constituted in trusted social networks between individuals and groups interacting across explicit, institutionalized, formal boundaries in society, is identified through the community resource management structure. This is not an exhaustive measure of these three elements of social capital, but it offers a general overview of communal organization as it pertains to promotion of resilience to identified shocks and stressors.

Research Objectives 1. Characterize the agro-pastoralist market system and its social networks, including sub groups, external groups, and interacting systems. 2. Assess the impacts of shocks and stressors (such as lean seasons, drought and conflict) on the social capital within agro-pastoralist system, most specifically regarding the relationship between the changes in social capital due to a shock or stress and the system as a whole and sub-groups’ food security. 3. Assess community responses and interventions to promote increased community resilience through different forms of social capital, including which parts of the system are engaged and/or relied upon during times of drought and conflict, which subsystems are affected by those changes, and possible negative effects of resilience capacities.

Methodology Focus group discussions serve as the primary data collection and community interaction tool for the Systems-Based Community Assessment Tool. However, this tool is not to be used in isolation: triangulation through a literature review and/or key informant interviews should be completed alongside the tool to enhance validity of findings. In each target community, four groups are to be conducted - one group with

25 adult men, one with adult women, one with male youth, and one with female youth. Participants will be randomly selected by field program staff and will aim to represent the diverse community subgroups. A one-day training is to be undertaken with program field staff to promote shared understanding of the proposed methodology and provide ample space for discussion on appropriate implementation. General guiding questions for FGDs are presented here, but this is to be used with the Systems-Based Community Assessment FGD Questionnaire.

To set the stage for a fluid conversation surrounding the mapping of social capital and how it may or may not have changed due to shocks or stresses, participants will first be asked to identify and prioritize primary events or factors that have impacted the community in the last five years. These events are assumed to be the primary shocks or stresses impacting the community. To better understand absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities of these target communities, participants will be asked to characterize the importance and nature of the linkages throughout the exercise both in time of reference and times of previously identified shock or stress.

Then, a 3-step process will be used to guide the participatory exercise and generate a model of the perceived community structure, market linkages, and resource management practices. The exercise will also gauge the strength, quantity, and quality of network links both at time of reference (or “normal” time) and when a shock or stress occurs so to assess how perceived shocks and stressors affect the community network.

Step 1: Bonding Social Capital The first mapping exercise will ask FDG participants to assess the structure of their community: the agro- pastoral system. This is based on how participating community members perceive their internal organization, in other words, how does the community function, which groups interact, what is the nature of groups’ relationships, and which groups are seen to hold more power? This first mapping exercise will provide a system structure for which further discussions move forward by providing a visual of the system network assessed through perceived linkages, or relationships between groups that participants identify.

Step 2: Bridging Social Capital The second mapping exercise will ask focus group discussion participants to identify and characterize market linkages their community engages as to assess their linkages to resources outside of the community. While participants may identify a number of markets, facilitators will convey that a central “market” at the center of the map will represent the market system in which the community participates. Noting these events’ impact could be done in a number of ways, including: which groups’ relationship with markets changes because of a shock, who has better or worse access to markets after a shock, and if market relationships changed between groups previously identified in Step 1: Bonding Social Capital exercise.

Step 3: Linking Social Capital Finally, participants will be asked to identify decision-making structures within and interacting with their community. Those structures, bodies, or groups (representing linking social capital) that steer communal response strategies to the above-mentioned shocks and stresses will be prioritized in the discussion. The capacity for communal action, characterized here by communal institutions that make decisions regarding communal response strategies, has been identified as a basis for resilience. This may also provide valuable insight into existing communal adaptive practices used to deal with system shocks and stressors.

In addition to mapping existing social capital, it is expected that this will generate a basic picture of how the community systems may react during times of stress and facilitate the identification of specific points or linkages where system failures occur, leading to negative system outputs such as generalized food insecurity. The goal of this tool is to better understand the smaller system failures that precede larger, more complete system failures such as death, famine, or displacement. System failures could include: rupture or breakdown of linkages between a system’s sub-groups (affecting bonding social capital), disconnect to

26 outside resources or markets (affecting bridging social capital), or inability of decision-making bodies to address a threat (affecting linking social capital).

Limitations and Bias As with all field-based research, significant limitations and sources of bias may arise. Notably, the present tool does not attempt to take a representative sample of the target the populations. This study will contribute to a general understanding provided by case data collected in each participating community. Results may vary if data were collected in other regions or at different times of the year. For the original research exercise, communities were selected due to their participation in Mercy Corps programming so that field staff that regularly work in these communities can help analyze results of how data may vary if collected at different points in time. Participation in focus groups will be voluntary and will be suggested by program staff in coordination with the village leadership, therefore presenting a biased sample. Groups excluded from focus group discussions, whether by choice, chance, or dynamics within the focus group discussion dynamics, should be noted in facilitators’ log as another source of bias. As previously stated, this tool should not be used in isolation, but be part of a strategy to understand community systems’ social capital and its relationship to resilience in the face of shocks and stresses.

Detailed Strategy for FGDs Materials needed: Flip Chart (large white paper for drawing), markers in easily visible colors (preferably at least 3 colors, no yellow).

Identification of Primary System Shocks and Stresses (15 minutes) Question 1: What are the primary events or problems that have impacted your community in the past 5 years? Participants will be asked to identify and characterize the major disturbances in the community over the last five years to discuss the nature of the shocks/stresses and how these have most the community in the last five years? (Lack of rainfall, floods, illness, conflict, etc.) Types of events, such as environmental shocks (lack of rainfall or flood), impacting production (pests, plague, animal disease), conflict, or health (disease), can be used as discussion cues. For each event, the following will be asked:  Type of event and description.  What percentage of the identified community group was impacted?  Rate the level of impact from 1-5 (scale shows increasing impact)

Characterization of Community Structure – Bonding Social Capital (45 minutes) Question 2: What social groups make up the community? Participants will be asked to identify existing community groups and their subgroups. Facilitators will record the list generated by the community, asking for further clarification when an identified subsystem is not understood. Participants will then be asked to list the subgroups that make up the larger groups identified above. These are meant to be large encompassing categorical groups. Facilitators may cue the discussion by offering possible examples (agriculturalists, herders, artisans, merchants, men’s groups, women’s groups, management groups, etc.):  How do people generally group themselves in your community? Headers, farmers, merchants, village chief´s family, teachers, artisans, etc.?  What types of people are in each group (e.g. women’s groups may include VSLAs, community garden groups) Participants then will be are asked to provide an approximate percentage of the community that makes up each group (communal groups will likely not be mutually exclusive). They will then give an approximate value (increasingly value 1 – 5 scale) to gauge the importance of each group to the community (e.g. merchants may only be 10% of the total population but could be rated a 5 and thus extremely important to the community’s survival, whereas herders may be 70% of the population but only somewhat important to

27 the community’s survival, ranking as a 2).

Question 3: How do community groups interact with each other? What links exist between groups? Participants will be asked to identify number and character/type (exchange links, social links, ethnic links) of links that exist between the groups mapped in Question 2. Each link will be given a numerical importance (increasing from 1 to 5) (e.g. Question: How do agriculturalists interact with herders? Answer: Agriculturalists sell grain to herders, sell hay to feed animals, and rely on the fertilizer from herders to restore fields. This is vitally important to the whole community, so it is given a value of 5). Facilitators will list identified links, perceived link strengths, and begin to draw links on the paper, using the name sheet as Question 2 where groups were identified. Facilitators may use different kinds of lines to denote different kinds of relationships (e.g. dotted lines for exchange links, straight lines for familial links, etc.).

Question 4: How was the community structure impacted by the events identified in Question 1? Participants will be asked to discuss ways in which certain groups were impacted by events previously listed and then subsequently asked if the impacted group’s links were impacted.

Question 5: How did the community prepare for, respond to, and recover from events identified in Question 1? Participants will be asked to discuss ways in which their community used strategies to prepare for, respond to, and/or recover from shocks and stresses. Facilitators should note important actors that led these efforts, were key for their implementation, were left out of the process, or may have been put at a disadvantage due to the strategy.

Community Group Interaction with Markets – Bridging Social Capital (40 minutes) Question 6: How does each community group interact with local markets? Participants will be asked how each group identified in Question 2 interact with local markets. The market is assumed to be a central point in the community structure, for purposes of discussion. While many markets may be discussed, the facilitator will convey the idea of a central market that may represent a number of different kinds or locations of markets (e.g. the livestock market that occurs once a month is the same market as the vegetable market that is open every day). Facilitators should identify these links in the following categories, which may be used as discussion cues: exchange links (goods-money, good-good, credit); social links (community interaction, information, recreation); information (price, quality, quantities, lost animals, employment search).  How does each group participate in the market? (E.g. for buying/selling goods, giving or receiving information).  What causes people to prefer specific markets to others or specific merchants over others?

Question 7: How where community interactions with local markets impacted by events described in question 1? These same market linkages will facilitate the discussion for Question 7 by asking participants how these interactions changed due to shocks and stresses previously identified. Facilitators should take special note of linkages that strengthened, weakened, became tense, or where conflict arose between groups due to changes in the linkages.

Community Resource Management Structure – Linking Social Capital (35 minutes) Question 8: What are the primary resources available in your community? Participants will be asked to identify the different kinds of resources in their community, such as land, water, or social services and resources (cereal banks, schools, health facilities). These resources will then be divided into resource subgroups. For instance, grazing routes, fields for farming maize, small community or household gardens are all land resources but vary in their use and importance for community groups. Once identified, these resources and their subgroups will be ranked by participants for their importance 28

(increasing scale from 1 to 5) and their availability (increasing scale from 1 to 5).

Question 9: Are there formal community structures to manage these resources? Participants will be asked to identify committees, groups, or individuals who manage and/or control the resources listed in Question 8. For each structure identified, participants will then be asked to describe the nature of the committee or controlling structure: What is the committee’s structure? Does it have a president? Or are there many members who share power equally? Is this group currently functional?

Question 10: How were community resources impacted by the events listed in Question 1? Participants will be asked to explain if and how community resources listed in Question 8 were impacted by the shocks and stresses previously identified.

Question 11: How did resource management committees prepare for, respond to and recover after events? Participants will be asked if the structures identified in Question 9 were able to prepare for, respond to, and/or recover from the events identified in Question 1. If participants discuss strategies for preparedness, response, and recovery, facilitators will take special note of the dynamics involved in these processes, including but not limited to: groups involved in these strategies, if linkages between groups became stronger because of the interaction with the resource management committees, if tension was created between groups due to a lack of preparedness, response, or recovery. In addition to assessing the impact on links previously stated, participants may identify new linkages that were created due to the shock or stress.

Annex 7: Systems Based Community Resilience Assessment FGD Questionnaire

1) Identification of Primary System Shocks and Stressors Question 1: What are the primary events or problems that have impacted your community in the past 5 years? Discussion cue: Type of events – Environmental {drought, floods, fires, irregular rain patterns}; Impacting production (crop pest/disease, animal disease); Conflict {within communal groups, amongst communities, large scale}; Health (disease) Event Description % of Level of impact community to community affected (1-5)

2) Characterization of Community Structure – Bonding Social Capital Question 2: What social groups make up the community? Discussion cues: Livelihood (farmers, herders, artisans, merchants, laborers) Social (men’s groups, women’s groups, religious groups, ethnicities); External (migrants, surrounding communities) Group Subgroups Description % of Importance community of community group (1-5)

Question 3: How do community groups interact with each other? What links exist between groups? Discussion cues: Exchange links {access to resources, buy-sell, credit, labor}; Familial links {family links, cousinage, ethnic links; confidence}; Political links. Group Links to other groups Description

Question 4: How was the community structure impacted by the events identified in question 1? Event Groups impacted and how they were impacted Links impacted and how they were impacted

Question 5: How did the community prepare for, respond to and recover from events in question 1? Event Community strategy Description Effectiveness (1-5)

3) Community Group Interaction with Markets – Bridging Social Capital Question 6: How does each community group interact with local markets? Discussion cues: Exchange links {goods-money, good-good, credit}; Social links {community interaction, information, recreation); Information {price, quality, quantities, lost animals, employment search}. Group Interactions with market

Question 7: How where community interactions with local markets impacted by events described in question 1? Event Interactions impacted and how

4) Community Resource Management Structure – Linking Social Capital Question 8: What are the primary resources available in the community? Discussion cues: (Fields, grazing lands, water resources, cereal banks, health facilities, educational facilities, religious facilities, etc.). Resource Resource Subgroups Description Importance Availability to (1-5) community (1-5)

Question 9: Are there formal community structures to manage community resource? Management committee Resources managed Description (composition, currently functional) Community satisfaction with committee (1-5)

Question 10: How were community resources impacted by events from question 1? Event Resource impacted and how

Question 11: How did resource management committees prepare for, respond to and recover after events? Event Committee strategy Description Effectiveness (1-5)