BRCiS III baseline: assessing resilience across households, communities, and ecosystems in Somalia
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.
