What do small-scale farmers in Bolivia, HIV-infected men in the U.S. who are unaware of their condition, and young married women in India have in common?
Ruby Sinha, a field representative from the Abt-led Market-Based Partnerships for Health Dimpa Injectable Contraceptive Program, conducts a one-on-one counseling session on Family Planning at Ranchi Jh, Jharkhand.
They are all the focus of Abt Associates projects designed to reduce their likelihood of experiencing negative events – such as financial loss and illness – and to limit the consequences of such events. In other words, Abt is helping reduce the risks they face and improving their ability to weather these risks.
“We at Abt recognize that preparing communities to withstand emergencies is more effective than providing relief once the emergency is over,” said Thierry van Bastelaer, principal associate in Abt’s International Health division. “In our work, we are constantly struck by the boundless talents that vulnerable populations bring to managing risk, day after day. They clearly have the skills to manage risk—what they lack is the tools to do it better. While our work serves more than 70 countries and addresses a wide variety of conditions, we are unified by our goal of providing these tools to vulnerable populations.”
The concept of resilience is embodied in fields as varied as climate change mitigation, preventative medical treatment, career pathways, homelessness prevention, protection against chemical products, disaster prevention, health insurance, and household asset-building.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chose Abt in 2011 to identify at least 3,000 HIV-infected men who have sex with men who do not know they have HIV and ensure they get tested and into treatment.
Fostering Innovation
Abt is more than a collection of people carrying out individual projects. Abt employees learn from each other.
Last year Abt created seven
methods centers to support the training and development of thinkers and methodologists across the company to ensure that innovations and good ideas spread throughout Abt.
Recently Abt created an eighth methods center on Risk and Resilience. This initiative will provide a new lens to identify common strategies to address global problems, such as poverty.
“People are poor in part because they live in high-risk environments, they only have access to investments with high risk and low returns, and their resources can be wiped out by small shocks,” said Carlos Martín, Abt senior associate in the Social and Economic Policy division, who is co-directing the Risk and Resilience Methods Center with van Bastelaer.
“We want to help people move from risk to resilience,” van Bastelaer said.
The Risk and Resilience Approach
Although the concepts of risk and resilience are closely linked, they refer to sets of actions that are put in place and activated at different moments. Risk reduction is focused on reducing the probability of an adverse event, such as losing one’s job, which partially can be reduced by, for example, engaging in on-the-job training. Resilience deals with people’s capacity to reduce the impact associated with an adverse event, such as loss of income from losing one’s job, which can be partially alleviated by savings and unemployment insurance.
The deployment of risk reduction and resilience actions is the result of the combination of several classes of strategies, which include behaviors, networks, products, and policies. The more strategies a household or a community has access to, the stronger its ability to lower the risks it faces and to bolster its resilience.
For more information on Abt Associates’ Methods Centers, visit the
centers’ web page.
Homepage photo: A Bolivian woman in the municipality of Caracollo holds a quinoa plant. Improving the farming and processing of this and other grains is a goal of the Bolivia Integrated Food Security Project, funded by USAID and managed by Abt.