Resilience and capacity building are concepts important to development practitioners throughout the Global South, and particularly in Africa. We have very few rigorous studies, however, that allow us to systematically measure or analyse these concepts. With this paper, we propose to gather resilience action plans (RAPs) from sub-national governments in multiple countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many national governments require municipalities to develop these plans on a regular basis. RAPs are high-level strategic documents of how a municipality should react in case of emergency and how it can build up capacity to improve its resilience. We will collect these plans and conduct text and content analysis to discern common themes, patterns and insights into local government planning, efforts to build resilience, and climate adaptation in Africa. This will create a textual dataset (corpus) for others to study text as data and explore topical issues pertaining to local government, and will help build measurement rubrics for resilience and capacity building that include local, evidence-based input.