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What does it mean to collaboratively work towards better resilience?
How can diverse voices come together to reimagine social protections that adequately address vulnerability?
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On July 18, 2025, Fields of View conducted “ಹೇಗೆ, ಏನು, ಎಷ್ಟು? | Hege, Yenu, Yeshtu: Reimagining Resilience” – a hands-on participatory workshop for exploring social protection measures towards building resilience. We were delighted to have 43 participants from over 30 organisations, spanning CSOs, research groups, foundations, and universities, gathered at the Student Christian Movement of India, Bengaluru for a day-long engagement with the factors that contribute to and mitigate vulnerability.
For the workshop, we used a modified version of our flagship tool, E-QLT, a data-driven simulation tool that uses a system dynamics modelling approach to model a household based on its member composition, income, expenditure, exposure to shocks, and access to social protection schemes.
Using the tool, participants quantitatively assessed the vulnerability of their chosen household over a 5-year period in terms of a Social Protection Score (SPS), a credit score-like metric that we developed to express household resilience across the dimensions of finance, health, and education.
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Over the course of the day, participants evaluated the efficacy of existing schemes to build household resilience and protect against the risks and shocks that the household is susceptible to. They leveraged the platform to learn the contribution of the bouquet of social protection on building resilience.
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“Tools like these are incredibly helpful in engaging governments on how schemes and policies are percolating on the ground. Also, being able to simulate our proposed solutions as scenarios gives us numbers and data that we can use to convince stakeholders about which approaches work and which don’t.”
- Participant
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Altogether, participants experimented with 51 different variations of the social protection net. 18 combinations were more effective at building resilience than the existing bouquet of schemes offered by the government. Participants employed different strategies for each household: in some cases, they opted for a mix of in-kind transfers, cash transfers and insurance; for others, participants chose zero interest debts and unconditional cash transfers as a way of strengthening resilience.
We hope that the conversations we started during the workshop can develop into a shared language around vulnerability, particularly one that considers leveraging tech for data-driven advocacy towards collaborative resilience building.
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“I found it to be a very useful tool to just generally think about what social protection can do and where it stops. One thing that I would like to see going forward is some engagement with how different instruments build resilience, given that the method of support delivery is very different between different mechanisms.”
- Participant
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Seeing such a diverse group of organisations engage so deeply with social protection has armed us with the confidence to shift the needle around vulnerability. We want to explore partnerships with actors in the vulnerability and social protection space to explore how organisations can use their knowledge of and relationships with communities in championing change.
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