Social Capital and Resilience in Guatemala

Research Brief

With support from USAID’s Cooperative Development Program (CDP), Global Communities has been studying social capital and its relationship with individual, household and community levels of resilience since 2013. This study builds on two previous research studies. The first was conducted in Uganda in 2014 and found that farmers were motivated to join a cooperative to build social capital by interacting with other farmers. The second study, conducted from 2019 to 2023 in Kenya, demonstrated that households rely upon local institutions, such as credit unions and cooperatives, in a time of crisis and can provide people with the means to smooth consumption habits or recover from income related shocks however an institutions’ ability to support members of a community differs from the type of shock that occurs. The USAID/CLEAR program (2018-2023) builds on these findings and expanded the research to Guatemala in October 2022 examining how social capital, particularly linking capital, can impact resilience.