The Somalia Resilience Program (SomReP) is a consortium of seven Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), the activities of which aim to enhance the resilience of vulnerable households and communities in Southern Somalia against cyclical shocks and stressors. This report serves as the baseline for the Third Party Monitoring (TPM) of SomReP in two districts in South and Central Somalia: Afgooye and Baidoa. The TPM study is undertaken by Forcier Consulting on behalf of SomReP, with the aim to rigorously monitor the progress and outcomes of the program.

The data indicates that resilience differed among livelihood groups (agro-pastoralist, pastoralists, and peri-urban), between women and men, and across seasons. This means that program approaches should take these differences into account when targeting groups for various interventions. For instance, people in peri-urban areas tended to have less diverse diets, while pastoralists tend to engage in more severe and frequent coping strategies. Out of the different livelihood types, pastoralists were also the most likely to report no access to risk transfer or sharing. Further, women tended to have less diverse incomes than men and incomes tend to be lowest in the dry season of Jilaal, the season in which most agriculture-related work was replaced with unskilled work. These findings indicate that women should be more frequently targeted for income diversity interventions, and pastoralists should be targeted with interventions that aim to increase social safety nets, such as risk sharing.

Capacities to deal with stressors in both the short and long-term were low across the targeted areas. Natural resource management (NRM) was poor in both districts and in and across communities. Sustainable access to natural resources is an important factor in ensuring long-term resilience and should therefore receive more attention across the communities. Response capacities were also absent across the communities. Only 9.7 of all respondents said their community had a community-based early warning system in place. Further, only 5.7% of the respondents said community initiatives existed that aimed to access support from sub-national and national institutions and authorities to respond to and cope with the recurrent shocks and stressors. Hence, moving forward, the program should ensure a focus of combined approaches to achieve improvements in system-wide resilience.