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LIVING THROUGH CRISES
crisis response programs and the efforts aimed at building resilience more broadly. We address them through the following questions: • What were the most common coping responses used by the poor and vulnerable and how effective were they at averting major impacts? • How were the costs of coping distributed among women, men, children, and youth? • How did the crises affect gender roles and community cohesion? • Which sources of support were the most useful and what role did social protection, other government programs, and community organizations play? At our disposal to address the questions are thousands of pages of country reports and focus group discussion transcripts from up to four rounds of qualitative research at select sites in Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mongolia, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia, Thailand, Ukraine, Vietnam, the Republic of Yemen, and Zambia. By including all 17 countries, we are able to generate a large body of qualitative data on crisis impact and coping. The chapter is structured as follows. The next section presents the conceptual framework and summarizes the major coping responses across all the study sites and countries. The section on qualitative research discusses the hardships faced by people during the crises. The next section surveys the sources of support people could rely upon, and the final section offers concluding reflections and implications for policy.
Major Coping Responses Conceptual Framework The analysis of coping did not adhere to any single academic concept; rather, it was guided by a broad-based framework of coping mechanisms (see figure 1.1). The analytical framework is based on observations in the field and inspired by a range of studies on poverty and vulnerability, both quantitative and qualitative, including Voices of the Poor (Narayan 2000); Moving out of Poverty (Narayan, Pritchett, and Kapoor 2009); and the work by Anirudh Krishna (Krishna 2004, 2007; Krishna and Shariff 2011), Robert Chambers, and Stefan Dercon (for example, Dercon 2004). By coping responses (or mechanisms), we refer to actions that households take to deal with shocks and avoid the worst impacts: eat cheaper foods and