Absorb, Adapt, Transform: Final Evaluation of the Central America-Melanesia (CAMEL) Resilience Building Program
A summative evaluation of the three-year Resilience Building Program implemented in El Salvador, Guatemala, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu funded by the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.
This evaluation was carried out to assess the project’s effectiveness, impact, and contribution to learning. The evaluation found that the project has largely achieved its objective of fostering community resilience, with distinct strengths and good practices emerging from each of the four countries. The greatest achievements have been in livelihoods and food security, particularly in relation to women’s access and contribution. The project has also generated a good understanding of risks within participating communities, and catalyzed or maintained community-based disaster preparedness. The experience of the project underscores the importance of holistic analysis and programming, and complementarity between interventions and efforts of all actors – households, community-based organizations, civil society, governmental and non-governmental organizations – for resilience building.
The evaluation report applies the lens of Oxfam’s Resilient Development Framework to assess the contribution of the project to various resilience capacities and enabling social change processes. Key recommendations are made for future program framing, project design, MEL, risk reduction strategies, gender justice and empowerment, and sustainability including the importance of inclusive leadership and the need to influence power/inequality.