CARE commissioned a Mid-Term Strategic Review (MTSR) of the Livelihoods for Resilience Activity to formulate recommendations for the remaining life of the project to increase effectiveness in achieving sustainable impact. The Livelihoods for Resilience Activity is being implemented in 27 Woredas in the three regions of Tigray, Amhara, and Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples and is just over the midway point in its five-year life from December 5, 2016, through December 3, 2021. The purpose of the Livelihoods for Resilience Activity is to reduce food insecurity and increase resilience for 97,900 chronically food insecure households that are enrolled in the fourth cycle of the Government of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP4), enabling them to graduate with resilience from the PSNP4.

The MTSR for the Livelihoods for Resilience Activity was a formative evaluation exercise intended to provide guidance on ways to improve the effectiveness of the program in achieving intended impact.

Relative to the four global learning questions for the MTSR (see page 4), the MTSR found that the model that the Livelihoods for Resilience Activity is implementing is effective for achieving graduation with resilience, but because frontline delivery is constrained by the number of staff, their technical capacities and the degree of supervision and support that they receive, interventions are not always going deeply enough to ensure behavioral change. The program is empowering women both economically and socially through the VESA platform, but there are significant variations between regions; and outside of the VESA, there is some evidence to suggest that women’s empowerment has not yet been well incorporated, especially in value chain participation and MFI linkages. Progress is certainly being made in transferring ideas and knowledge to PSNP counterparts, but that has not yet translated into practice mainly because of resource constraints. Key approaches that need to be added or strengthened in the coming two years include expanding frontline delivery capacities, expanding efforts to ensure that strategies and approaches are well understood by implementation staff at all levels in all partners, ensuring that women’s empowerment is included in all approaches by all partners, and looking for new ways to facilitate access to jobs, either through self-employment or wage employment, for youth from PSNP households.

The Livelihoods for Resilience Activity is already doing some very nice work in starting to achieve sustainable impact. The project has strong potential to be recognized as a “great” project if it can make some adjustments.