Understanding and Assessing Resilience: A SenseMaker-based Methodology

CRS developed its Pathway to Prosperity approach in 2013 to help farmers recover from shocks and stressors by building and growing their assets. The approach also helps farm families partner with better-off farmers and other value chain actors. As projects using the new methodology began to be implemented, questions emerged on how to measure progress along the pathway. After trying various approaches with mixed results, a complexity‑aware method called SenseMaker was used to develop a tool for this purpose, and tested interactively in nine case studies in Latin America, East Africa and Southeast Asia.

This learning brief explains how the tool works, with examples of the type of findings that have been generated, followed by the lessons learned from iterative cycles of testing and adjusting the tool from 2015 to 2017.