The Resilience Chatbot was designed to make impact measurement faster, lighter, and closer to the people it serves. Across two pilots, with Assuraf and Scrapays, we tested whether WhatsApp could capture reliable, comparable resilience signals at scale.
These three companion pieces trace that journey: first, the creation of the tool; then, the human stories behind the data; and finally, how these same signals can help us understand and strengthen climate adaptation on the ground.
Together, they tell the full story - from prototype to insight, from signals to systems - showing how light-touch data can reveal the deeper dynamics of resilience.
Building a fast, comparable way to measure resilience
Exploring how we built the WhatsApp Resilience Chatbot: a fast, low-cost tool turning qualitative hunches about resilience into comparable, quantitative signals across startups.
What the data revealed about how people recover
Digging into what those signals revealed: the patterns, gaps, and lived realities behind the data, and what they tell us about how vulnerable users experience shocks, recovery, and progress.
Why early resilience data matters for adaptation
We can’t climate-proof livelihoods we don’t understand. The same short WhatsApp surveys that trace financial stress can also reveal how climate exposure is lived: in income volatility, health shocks, and recovery time.
IPCC (2022). Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II – Africa Regional Chapter
About FSD Africa
Established in 2012 and supported by UK aid, FSD Africa is a specialist development agency working to build and strengthen financial markets across sub-Saharan Africa. FSD Africa is incorporated as a non-profit company limited by guarantee in Kenya. It is funded by UK aid from the UK government. We work to reduce poverty through a ‘market systems development’ approach, which means we aim to address the structural, underlying causes of poverty by improving how financial market systems function.
About Catalyst Fund
Catalyst Fund is a venture capital fund and venture builder backing tech startups driving a climate-resilient future in Africa. We combine early-stage capital with hands-on venture-building support to help founders scale innovative solutions that improve the resilience of communities and the planet.
Learn more at www.thecatalystfund.com
