Minimum Economic Recovery Standards for Crisis Livelihoods Training Course

Course overview

Economic recovery interventions can unintentionally distort local markets, exclude vulnerable groups, create unsustainable assets, or duplicate services when teams move from needs assessments to livelihoods programming without a common quality framework. The Minimum Economic Recovery Standards (MERS) provide that framework: practical standards and guidance for supporting affected populations to protect assets, restore income, access markets, and rebuild resilient economic systems after conflict, disaster, displacement, or public health emergencies. This course helps practitioners make defensible programme choices when time, evidence, funding, and operational access are constrained.

Participants work through the MERS structure and apply its cross-cutting standards to assessment, analysis, programme design, implementation, monitoring, and adaptation. They learn to define economic recovery objectives; analyse market systems, livelihood strategies, and financial services; select appropriate interventions; integrate protection, gender, inclusion, and environmental considerations; and establish monitoring indicators that test whether recovery support is safe, relevant, and economically viable. The course also clarifies how MERS aligns with Sphere, the Core Humanitarian Standard, cash and voucher assistance, and local economic recovery approaches.

Teaching combines instructor-led interpretation of the standards with a sustained crisis-recovery case study. Teams review assessment evidence, identify gaps against MERS, compare intervention options, develop a results framework, and test their design against market, protection, and delivery risks. Each participant leaves with a completed MERS-aligned economic recovery programme design pack: an assessment checklist, intervention selection rationale, market and risk analysis, indicator set, and 90-day application plan for use in their own response portfolio.

The course is suited to humanitarian and development professionals who design, manage, assess, fund, or assure livelihoods, market systems, enterprise recovery, and financial inclusion programmes. It is particularly valuable for staff moving from general emergency response or cash programming into accountable economic recovery work.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Apply the Minimum Economic Recovery Standards to assess the quality and completeness of a crisis livelihoods programme.
• Conduct a MERS-aligned livelihoods and market assessment using household, trader, service-provider, and institutional evidence.
• Develop an economic recovery problem statement that distinguishes immediate coping needs from medium-term market recovery constraints.
• Select and justify livelihood, market systems, enterprise, employment, or financial services interventions using MERS decision criteria.
• Construct a results framework with recovery outcomes, assumptions, indicators, and disaggregated monitoring measures.
• Integrate protection, gender, disability inclusion, conflict sensitivity, and environmental risk controls into programme design.
• Assess market functionality and delivery risks before using cash, in-kind inputs, grants, vouchers, or business support.
• Produce a MERS-aligned economic recovery programme design pack for an operational crisis scenario.

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Livelihoods Programme Managers — who need to design and assure recovery interventions across emergency and early-recovery portfolios
• Economic Recovery Advisors — who translate market and household analysis into technically sound programme options
• Humanitarian Programme Coordinators — who must align multi-sector response plans with credible recovery pathways
• Cash and Voucher Assistance Specialists — who need to determine when cash supports, rather than undermines, market recovery
• MEAL Officers — who develop indicators and evidence systems for livelihoods and market-based programmes
• Donor and Grants Managers — who review economic recovery proposals, budgets, and results claims before approval

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course. Participants should be familiar with the basic humanitarian programme cycle: needs assessment, targeting, activity planning, implementation, and monitoring. Experience working with livelihoods, cash and voucher assistance, food security, local markets, small enterprise, or early recovery is helpful but not essential. Participants should be able to read simple programme logframes and work with basic spreadsheet tables. No prior training in MERS, formal economics, market systems development, statistical software, or financial modelling is required. Complete beginners should expect to learn the core terminology before applying it in guided case exercises.

Training methodology

The course uses short instructor-led briefings to interpret each MERS domain, followed by structured application to a single displacement-and-market-disruption case. Participants work with household profiles, trader interviews, price data, service maps, and programme constraints to make design decisions. Small groups compare intervention options, use MERS checklists to challenge assumptions, and present recommendations for peer critique. Individual exercises build an assessment plan, risk register, results framework, and monitoring matrix. The final session converts the case learning into a 90-day application plan for each participant’s current or planned programme.

Course outline

Day 1: MERS foundations and economic recovery framing

• Purpose, scope, and structure of the Minimum Economic Recovery Standards
• Economic recovery across emergency, early-recovery, and resilience phases
• MERS cross-cutting standards and their programme-quality implications
• Links between MERS, the Sphere Handbook, and the Core Humanitarian Standard
• Livelihoods, markets, financial services, and employment recovery concepts
• Household coping strategies, productive assets, and economic vulnerability
• Defining recovery objectives, target groups, and geographic market boundaries

Workshop: Teams map the economic impacts of a displacement crisis and produce a MERS-based recovery problem statement with priority target groups.

Day 2: Assessment and market analysis for recovery decisions

• MERS assessment principles, evidence standards, and triangulation
• Household economy and livelihoods profile data collection
• Market actor mapping, supply chains, and critical market functions
• Rapid market assessment methods for goods, labour, and services
• Financial services assessment for savings, credit, payments, and insurance
• Gender, age, disability, and protection analysis in economic assessments
• Assessment sampling, key informant interviews, and data-quality checks

Workshop: Participants build an assessment plan and market-system map from a case-data pack, identifying evidence gaps that could alter programme choices.

Day 3: Selecting appropriate economic recovery interventions

• MERS intervention selection criteria and decision-making sequence
• Cash, vouchers, and in-kind support within market recovery strategies
• Asset replacement, productive grants, and enterprise recovery support
• Skills development, employment promotion, and labour-market linkages
• Market facilitation and support to traders, producers, and service providers
• Financial inclusion approaches and responsible linkage to providers
• Targeting, graduation criteria, and avoidance of market distortion

Workshop: Groups compare four intervention options and produce a documented MERS intervention-selection matrix with assumptions and exclusions.

Day 4: Designing safe, inclusive, and accountable programmes

• Theory of change development for economic recovery programmes
• Results frameworks, outcome pathways, and critical assumptions
• Protection risk analysis for cash, assets, employment, and enterprise support
• Gender equality, disability inclusion, and safeguarding design measures
• Conflict sensitivity, do-no-harm, and local power analysis
• Environmental screening for livelihoods inputs and market interventions
• Partner capacity assessment, delivery modalities, and accountability mechanisms

Workshop: Participants draft a theory of change, risk register, and inclusion actions for their selected intervention, then conduct a peer MERS quality review.

Day 5: Monitoring, adaptation, and operational application

• MERS-aligned monitoring indicators for income, assets, markets, and resilience
• Baseline design and disaggregation by sex, age, disability, and livelihood group
• Market monitoring of prices, availability, trader capacity, and supply disruptions
• Post-distribution monitoring and participant feedback mechanisms
• Adaptive management triggers and response decision thresholds
• Learning reviews, evidence use, and programme-course correction
• Economic recovery design-pack documentation and implementation planning

Workshop: Each participant completes and presents a MERS-aligned programme design pack and 90-day workplace application plan for facilitator feedback.

Tools & standards covered

Minimum Economic Recovery Standards (MERS), Sphere Handbook, Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS), KoboToolbox

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions