Health, Resilience and Sustainable Poverty Escapes

How can vulnerable households sustain an escape from poverty, weathering the ongoing and multiple shocks and stresses that they will face over their lifetimes? Poor and near-poor households and communities live in increasingly complex risk environments and are subject to a range of shocks and stresses that threaten their food security, nutrition and ability to sustainably escape poverty.

A series of mixed-method country case studies were commissioned by the USAID Center for Resilience aimed at expanding our understanding of the drivers of sustained poverty escapes across contexts. The case studies also teased out policy and programming implications to help inform a synthesis study focused on health.

In this joint Marketlinks/Agrilinks event, participants heard about key findings from the research and learned how health matters when it comes to poverty escapes. This included a better understanding of health shocks and health as resilience capacity that protects individuals, households, and communities when poverty escapes are the primary outcome.