Concern Worldwide prepares SHARP tool for use in South Sudan

The BRACED Consortium led by Concern Worldwide will be the first organisation to apply SHARP, an innovative tool from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, in Sudan. The tool will be used to look at resilience and climate change from the perspective of the South Sudanese.

Background

The Self-evaluation and Holistic Assessment of climate Resilience of farmers and Pastoralists (SHARP) tool addresses the need to better understand the situations, concerns and interests of farmers and pastoralists relating to climate resilience through a participatory self-assessment.

SHARP was developed by FAO in 2013 in collaboration with a number of universities and NGOs, and has been tested or implemented in 8 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The SHARP tool is used in the form of a tablet-based application and is currently available in four languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese). It works as a survey to combine an academic assessment of climate resilience with a self-assessment by farmers and pastoralists. SHARP differs from traditional surveys in that it encourages in-depth discussion and community dialogue to help identify areas of low resilience and then to priorities potential actions.

SHARP can be used as both a baseline/M&E tool in order to measure resilience as well as a learning and community dialogue tool integrated into farmer/pastoral field schools and other interventions.

Three phases of SHARP

The SHARP assessment is organized around three phases. During a first phase, data is collected through the SHARP survey by using a dedicated tablet application. In a second phase, data collected is analyzed: priorities in terms of low areas of climate resilience to address are highlighted and discussed with individuals and communities in a participatory manner. In a third phase, data collected at the individual/household level are joined with other types of information (e.g. climate data and forecasts) in order to identify a set of potential actions to discuss to individuals and communities to improve their resilience.

The SHARP survey

SHARP was built upon 13 agroecosystem indicators of resilience and was refined through peer review and e-discussions with experts. In a review of resilience measurement tools, ODI stated that “…sector-specific indicators may be the most effective (e.g. SHARP), because they can provide enough context by asking detailed questions.

The survey includes 54 questions that look at five areas of climate resilience: agricultural practices, governance, environmental, social and economic. The questions are asked at the individual level but in group settings (3-5 people). They are structured in four parts: the first one collects quantitative information on availability of resources (e.g. how many water sources are available; how many crops are cultivated). The second and third parts collect qualitative information, on perceived adequacy and importance of each resource. These portions of the questions allow farmers to give their own opinions and perceptions. A fourth part is free text-based and allows for further elaborations that can be used to better understand low/high resilience scores.

The final resilience ranking is based on scoring that puts together the quantitative (part 1) and qualitative (parts 2-3) sections of the questions. The ranking is used to identify high and low areas of resilience to climate change of respondents. Information is collected at the individual/household level and the tablet application allows for immediately performing basic analysis and comparisons (e.g. by gender, age, practice, group).

More complex types of data analysis (e.g. individual against the whole community, against other individuals/communities in the province/region/country) can be performed by exporting the database directly from the tablet. A number of tools (e.g. Excel macros) are freely available for performing analysis of data.

SHARP provides an opportunity for rigorous assessments of climate resilience and engenders community dialogue to improve resilience in a participatory manner.

More information about SHARP can be found at:

www.fao.org/agriculture/crops/thematic-sitemap/theme/spi/sharp/en/