The Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement and Market Expansion (PRIME) project is a 5-year, $62 million USAID-funded initiative in Ethiopia. PRIME aims to increase household incomes and promote resilience to climate change through innovative, scalable, market-driven approaches in the pastoralist areas of Afar, Somali and Oromiya. This document captures the findings from the first Interim Monitoring Survey (IMS) of PRIME's external impact evaluation. The overall impact evaluation seeks to determine whether the project achieves its objective of enhancing the resilience of households to shocks, and whether PRIME interventions have had a positive impact on well-being outcomes, including poverty, food security and children’s nutritional status. This IMS aims to capture household and community responses to the regional drought in 2014 in order to measure the programme's progress against the objective of promoting resilience to climate change.
Intervention description
PRIME's interventions include; facilitating trainings to milk-producing households with a focus on nutrition and climate resilient practices, facilitating trade fairs, providing business support grants, conducting multi-stakeholder Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP) workshops, and creating policy directives to influence 18 policies and practices.
Evidence methodology
PRIME's overall impact evaluation uses a mixed methods approach. This interim monitoring survey was administered to 400 households in 17 communities in monthly intervals over the space of six months. The goal of survey sample selection was to ensure a representative sample of at least 400 households from among the baseline sample. Sample selection was based on a stratified random design, with the strata being the two project areas, and enumeration areas randomly selected within them. In addition, qualitative data was collected in kebeles through focus group discussions and key informant interviews in order to determine how communities were coping with the shocks, how social capital functioned in the face of shocks, and how community structures held up under shocks.
Useful for:
This impact evaluation is valuable for donor organisations and practitioners using a market systems approach to increasing household resilience to climate change.