Karamoja strategic resilience assessment

This Strategic Resilience Assessment (STRESS) illustrates how individuals, households, communities, governments, and non-governmental actors can build resilience to shocks and stresses that threaten progress toward development goals. Mercy Corps defines resilience as the capacity of communities in complex socio-ecological systems to learn, cope, adapt, and transform in the face of shocks and stresses. Resilience is not the outcome of good development, but rather an ability that allows development to continue on positive trajectory in spite of disruption. Undertaken between February and April 2016, this STRESS seeks to understand vulnerability and resilience in the context of Karamoja, identifying a set of capacities vital to securing Mercy Corp’s vision and theory of change for building an Empowered Karamoja by 2026. Four guiding questions framed the STRESS process in Karamoja: Resilience of What? Resilience to What? Resilience for Whom? Resilience Through What? These questions frame the results of the STRESS process below.

Karamoja’s main livelihood strategies and the social, ecological, and economic systems that underpin them are in transition. While the government’s most recent disarmament campaign brought relative stability to a region plagued for decades by violent armed conflict, this period also witnessed a catastrophic decline in Karamoja’s livestock population on which communities have traditionally depended for food, income, and collective identity. Largely out of distress, households are turning towards agriculture, natural resource extraction, urban livelihoods, and out-migration to meet basic needs. While new urban-based livelihood are bringing individuals and households closer to services like health care and education, the rush to claim land in agricultural settlement areas is doing the opposite. Enhanced peace and security, the need for agricultural and urban land, and government concessions to mining companies have contributed to rising land value and competition to claim it.