The BRCiS III baseline brings together two complementary assessments to build a comprehensive understanding of resilience capacities across household, community, and ecosystem levels in 19 districts of southern and central Somalia. Conducted at the start of the five-year BRCiS III programme, the baseline provides a foundation for evidence-based, adaptive implementation of resilience-building interventions.
The main baseline, led by Causal Design, combines household surveys, Community Scoring Dialogues, and ecosystem-level data to assess how Somali communities experience and respond to shocks and stresses. It introduces the Resilience Spectrum Score, an integrated index developed to capture the interplay between household, community, and environmental resilience capacities. The findings offer insight into the differential effects of shocks on vulnerable groups, the coping strategies employed by households, and the existing resilience assets that can be strengthened to reduce the risk of displacement and crisis.
In parallel, an ecosystem baseline conducted by CIFOR-ICRAF provides a field-validated, spatially explicit analysis of land health across 37 BRCiS III sites. Using the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), remote sensing, and community surveys, this report classifies levels of ecosystem degradation and highlights critical challenges such as widespread erosion, low vegetation cover, and declining access to essential natural resources during dry seasons and climate extremes. Key findings from this study are integrated into the broader baseline narrative to support a multi-dimensional understanding of resilience.
Together, these two assessments form the BRCiS III baseline and underscore the programme’s core premise: that resilience must be strengthened holistically across people, systems, and landscapes. The results will guide the design, sequencing, and adaptation of layered interventions aimed at building long-term resilience and reducing humanitarian needs in Somalia.
The endline evaluation has two aims: to measure how resilience changed since the baseline (2024), and to assess how far that change can be attributed to BRCiS III. Because it is not a counterfactual impact study, it pursues the second aim through a contribution analysis. Rather than claiming sole credit for observed change, this approach traces the pathways from the project's activities to outcomes, weighs quantitative and qualitative evidence together, tests each finding against alternative explanations such as drought, the role of other actors, and pre-existing community systems, and rates the strength of each contribution claim as Strong, Moderate, or Limited.
The evidence base combines a household survey of a panel of 3,889 households interviewed in both rounds, community focus group discussions across 168 communities in 21 districts, and, for the programme's learning and coordination outcome, interviews with consortium, government, and partner stakeholders. Change is measured against the BRCiS III logframe and the composite Resilience Spectrum Index. The Index measures resilience at the household, community and ecosystem levels.
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