The pilot study was conducted within the operational area of the Highlands Resilience Activity (HRA), implemented by Mercy Corps, and funded by USAID. 
HRA is being implemented in six regions in the highlands of Ethiopia. The project goal is  to support 33,000 PSNP households in reaching sustainable graduation thresholds through the following interventions:

• Strengthening on-farm and off-farm enterprises
• Creating wage employment opportunities
• Improving diets
• Enhancing resilient market systems and commercialization
• Facilitating private investment and finance.

The study comprises three components employing a combination of quantitative, semi-quantitative, and qualitative methods.

Component One: Quantitative survey of households (as food consumers and producers). Component One will entail an analysis of consumers and smallholder producers of key food and agricultural commodities identified in collaboration with HRA. The main objective of Component Two is to collect quantitative data from consumers and smallholder producers that will allow for exploration of the linkages between food system resilience capacity of smallholders, household resilience capacity of consumers, and, ultimately, how these two forms of resilience capacity support household food security in the face of shocks.

Component Two: Qualitative assessment of the resilience capacity of market agents. Component Two is a qualitative study implemented concurrently (or appropriately sequenced) with Component One, focusing on agents in key commodity value chains upstream and downstream from smallholder producers and household consumers of food products. The main objective of Component Two is to collect data that enables the evaluation of food system resilience capacity for various agents in commodity value chains that can be spatially linked to quantitative data collected in Components Two and Four to ultimately assess the relationship between actors' resilience capacities, food system resilience outcomes, and household resilience capacities and outcomes

Component Three: High-Frequency Data Collection of Prices and Availability of Staple Foods. The main objective of Component Three is to collect data on changes in the availability and price of essential agricultural commodities in the food system over short time intervals (one month). These data provide a crucial link between food system resilience outcome data collected in Component Two and household resilience capacity and food security impact measures collected in Component One. In cases where important non-food agricultural commodities are identified as important livelihood components in the food system, price and availability will also be tracked for these commodities to analyze together with income data.