Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement and Market Expansion (PRIME) Project Impact Evaluation

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The Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement and Market Expansion (PRIME) project was implemented from October 2012 to September 2017 in one of the most shock-prone areas of the world, the drylands of Ethiopia. A key project goal was to enhance the resilience of households to shocks. In particular, it aimed to enable households to withstand and recover from the recurrent climate-related shocks—mainly drought—to which they are exposed.

This report has drawn on the data collected as part of the PRIME Impact Evaluation (IE) Baseline and Endline Surveys, as well as two Recurrent Monitoring Surveys, to meet three objectives:
(1) Document the changes that have taken place over the project’s implementation period in key resilience-related variables (shock exposure, livelihoods, resilience capacities, coping strategies, wellbeing outcomes, and resilience);
(2) Determine whether the project’s resilience-strengthening interventions served to strengthen households’ resilience to shocks;
(3) Identify which resilience capacities—including specific absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities—were strengthened, and by which types of interventions, in order to inform and enhance the effectiveness of future resilience-strengthening projects.

The PRIME impact evaluation was conducted in two of the three project areas: Borena in the regional state of Oromiya and Jijiga in Somali, for a sample of 2,750 panel households. It draws on both quantitative and qualitative data, the latter collected through key informant interviews and focus group discussions [188 pages]