The African Development Bank (AfDB) on Thursday announced its creation of a new tool to diagnose fragility in countries, taking into account their capacities and pressures they may be under.
Called the Country Resilience and Fragility Assessment (CRFA), the tool offers a completely new method of assessing resilience and fragility using seven key criteria, namely political inclusiveness, safety and security, justice, the economy, social cohesion, the regional contagion effect, and climate change.
In addition to assessing resilience and fragility, the new tool should also be useful for advocacy and communication and improving and strengthening dialogue between the Bank and its regional members. It should also help to anticipate crises, thanks to an early warning system.
According to African Press Organisation (APO) Group which distributed the news on behalf of the bank, before its approval by the Bank Board on 11 September, the CRFA, was subjected to a range of checks for reliability and effectiveness, conducted under the supervision of the Transition States Coordination Office, with support from the Bank’s statistics and resource mobilization departments.
Commenting on the initiative, Director of the Transition States Coordination Office (RDTS), Sibry Tapsoba, explained that “the creation of the CRFA represents a significant advance in the assessment of fragility, which is a reality that it is not always easy to pin down or discern.
“By introducing, for the first time, the concepts of ‘capacities’ and ‘pressures’, this new tool brings much more rigour and effectiveness to the assessment of resilience and fragility, especially since it takes greater account of the national context”, Tapsoba added.
In his remarks, an official of the bank’s Resource Mobilization Department, Riadh Ben Messaoud, said: “What we have here is an assessment tool of unquestionable rigour. It is easy to use, it is reliable and it is accessible to all. It brings an undeniable added value to existing techniques for the assessment of resilience and fragility.”
According to the news report, the creation of a new fragility and resilience assessment tool is an important contribution to research efforts for greater effectiveness in the Bank’s work.
The CRFA provides better insight into every dimension of fragility, including the less obvious, making it possible to offer the most appropriate responses in terms of building a country’s capacity and resilience.
