Impacts of increasing community resilience through humanitarian aid in Pakistan
In this impact evaluation report, authors evaluated a humanitarian aid package aimed at building resilience of local communities and enhancing recovery and coping capacities. Extreme weather events and natural disasters, like floods and earthquakes, can cause great losses in human and physical capital. The impact of these events can be particularly disastrous on developing countries that are often under-prepared for such emergencies. Catastrophes have often severely impacted poor and vulnerable populations, and have led to recurrent humanitarian disasters in the past years. They intensify existing vulnerabilities in communities such as lack of proper shelter, livelihoods and sanitation, thereby contributing to the spread of disease and malnutrition.
This report shows evidence of the basic humanitarian aid package’s socio-economic impacts and adapted behaviour among beneficiaries of the capacity-enhancement training delivered by the NGO. Overall, treated villagers are more likely to have safe shelters, better sanitation and safe water, and can implement the new fertility and livestock management techniques. With the help of three-year panel data and a random allocation of village clusters into the programme, the authors are able to show that the effects persist even one year after the programme ended in the respective areas. Additionally, the authors also found that these interventions translate into a higher likelihood for villagers to own livestock and face fewer shelter damages in areas affected by extreme weather events.