Resilience Measurement, Evidence and Learning Community of Practice
A 2017–2018 project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through the Windward Fund, that built a Community of Practice to strengthen how resilience is measured, evidenced and learned from across development and humanitarian sectors.
About the project
Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation through the Windward Fund, this project ran between 2017 and 2018 with a clear and ambitious purpose: to strengthen how resilience is measured, evidenced, and learned from across the global development and humanitarian sectors. As resilience had grown into a widely adopted concept in programming, the field still lacked consistent, rigorous, and practical approaches to demonstrating its impact. This project sought to change that.
Objectives: The project established and nurtured a Community of Practice (CoP) that brought together practitioners, researchers, evaluators, and policymakers to collectively address the measurement challenges facing resilience programming. The CoP aimed to build a robust evidence base, advance methodological innovation, and generate practical guidance that organisations could apply across diverse and complex contexts.
The community engaged a wide range of stakeholders, including humanitarian organisations, development partners, academic researchers, and donors seeking credible ways to demonstrate the impact of their resilience investments.
Key successes
One of the most outstanding achievements of the project was the development of a practical guidance framework on resilience measurement. This framework offered organisations concrete support in selecting context-appropriate indicators, conducting participatory resilience assessments with communities, tracking outcomes over time, and attributing change to specific interventions within complex systems.
The CoP brought rigour and creativity to methodological innovation. Members explored systems mapping to understand resilience dynamics, network analysis to capture the social capital dimensions of resilience, and scenario testing to assess anticipatory capacity. These approaches were grounded in real-world case studies from diverse contexts, generating rich lessons about what works in resilience measurement and where persistent challenges remain.
A particularly important contribution of the CoP was its focus on equity. The community developed approaches to measure differential resilience across population groups, ensuring that resilience-building efforts did not inadvertently deepen existing inequalities. This equity lens strengthened the credibility and relevance of the frameworks produced.
The project also made meaningful progress in bridging the often-separate measurement traditions of the humanitarian and development sectors. By fostering dialogue and shared tools across these communities, the CoP advanced more integrated approaches to measuring resilience in protracted crises and contexts of recurrent shocks.
South-south learning was another hallmark of the initiative. By connecting resilience measurement practitioners across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the CoP created a platform for cross-contextual exchange, enabling organisations to adapt and apply lessons from one setting to another with greater confidence.
Through regular virtual knowledge-sharing sessions, in-person workshops, and focused working groups on topics such as proxy indicators and cost-effectiveness analysis, this project left behind a stronger, more connected global community of practice, better equipped to demonstrate that resilience investments deliver lasting results.
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