Making the concept of resilience in the Sahel more useful

This issue brief critiques how ‘resilience’ is often discussed and operationalised in the Sahel, arguing that abstract language and technical framing obscure real challenges. It calls for grounded, problem-driven analysis and cross-sector collaboration to make resilience efforts more effective and scalable.

Key messages:

• Most of the people who need to contribute to supporting resilience in the Sahel do not use the label ‘resilience’ for theirwork.
• Creating the policies and investments needed is a huge and collective endeavour, involving economists, agriculturalscientists, sociologists, market and health specialists, experts in social protection and humanitarian action, and manyothers. Each national government is responsible for the vision of what would be a sustainable economy and viablelivelihoods in their country.
• A common language is needed for policy makers across the different sectors to understand how different contributions combine and what should be prioritised. The current resilience discourse is highly insular and is preventingcommunication with all the efforts to build resilience that do not use that label.
• The dominance of resilience-speak has also divorced the resilience sector from the real world in several critical ways.The problem identification (‘more droughts, more vulnerability’) does not relate to the facts; the problem analysisis disconnected from concrete issues in people’s lives; and M&E in resilience language is preventing lessons beinglearned about what actually helps people.
• Although investments in resilience are promoted as a way of reducing future humanitarian need, in practice the twoexist in different silos with no common points of reference, metrics or language.
• Resilience frameworks and resilience lenses are not the problem. They have a lot to contribute, but they have to beused in radically different ways. They need to be put at the service of collective efforts to improve people’s lives, ratherthan dictating the terms of the efforts of a discrete resilience clique.