Policy LINK Facilitates High-Level Experts’ Consultation on Resilience
The expert group poses with the C4FS team after the workshop.
Policy LINK’s Champions for Food Security (C4FS) Activity facilitated a high-level experts’ consultation meeting drawn from government, civil society organizations, and USAID implementing partners on November 30, 2023 in Addis Ababa ahead of the kick-off workshop for a new project in Ethiopia, the Partnership for Lowlands Resilience Activity (PLRA).
The meeting drew lessons from stakeholders who were involved in two prior USAID resilience activities, the Pastoralist Livelihoods Initiative (PLI) and the Agriculture Knowledge, Learning, Documentation and Policy (AKLDP) project, both implemented by Tufts University.
C4FS is expanding its activities in Ethiopia to include backbone support for the PLRA. The overall aim of PLRA is to improve communication, coordination, and collaboration among development actors implementing resilience projects at the federal and regional levels and within selected woredas. The PLRA will be implemented in Afar, Oromia, Somali and Southern Ethiopia.
Dr. Berhanu Admassu, the then Chief of Party of the PLI and AKLDP projects, discussed his experience in the two initiatives coordinating resilience activities in pastoralist areas.
Dr. Berhanu Admassu shared the experience of two projects that worked in resilience coordination in pastoralist areas.
PLI’s main activities were to improve the livelihoods and resilience of pastoralist communities in Afar, Oromia, and Somali regions, whereas AKLDP assisted the Ethiopian government, USAID, and implementing partners in learning, documenting, and scaling up evidence-based best practices in agriculture, food security, and nutrition to shape policies and strategies.
Some of the lessons from the two projects, according to Dr. Berhanu, included the need to support long-term knowledge capture and sharing within changing contexts, policies, and programs. He emphasized the importance of having direct engagements with senior federal and regional government actors and working with those who have experience in development, resilience, and humanitarian activities. He also stressed the importance of objectivity and independence—being free from political influence—and having strong communication strategies and learning capacity.
Discussing the challenges in prior project implementations, participants noted the difficulty in facilitating coordination efforts, high staff turnover, and lack of interest from some project partners in collaboration. The need for harmonizing and coordinating efforts for maximum impact was also emphasized.
This meeting was the first planned high-level consultation as part of C4FS’s role in PLRA, and it has helped stock-taking in soliciting past experience that can be used as an input for current work planning. C4FS will continue to facilitate learning forums to better understand stakeholder interests and ideas and to develop evidence-backed workplans to provide effective backbone support in the pastoralist community.