As building resilience through integrated and adaptive programming becomes an increasingly important component of development projects, clients and implementing partners are testing innovative interventions to reduce household vulnerability, improve food security, and drive inclusive economic growth that enables learning and self-reliance. 

NORC helps its clients to course-correct, adapt programming, and scale innovations by conducting rigorous research and evaluations that attribute outcomes to interventions, providing insights into the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of resilience and food security programming.

NORC draws on robust in-house expertise and longstanding relationships with local partners to implement innovative mixed-methods evaluation and data collection approaches for resilience contexts, including rapid assessment, survey techniques to interview hard-to-reach populations, harnessing geospatial data, and developing indicators to complement standard household survey measures. We have conducted research across a wide range of international agriculture and resilience contexts in over 30 countries. In Niger, NORC led a mixed-methods summative evaluation of three USAID Development Food Assistance Programs, assessing the effectiveness and sustainability of interventions to improve household and community agricultural productivity, health and nutrition, livelihoods, early warning systems and resilience. In Senegal, NORC’s quasi-experimental impact evaluation of USAID’s Yaajeende Activity generated important learning on whether and how a nutrition-led agricultural approach impacted household food security, poverty, malnutrition, and resilience. In Honduras, we led a mixed-methods evaluation to understand how and why household food security, nutrition, poverty trajectories and resilience are changing under Feed the Future programming.