This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on July 30, 2024. Watch the full video here.
Caitlin Welsh: On behalf of CSIS and USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security, under the Feed the Future Initiative, I’d like to welcome our audience, in-person and online, to today’s event, Roadmap to Resilience: USAID’s updated resilience policy. I’m Caitlin Welsh, director of the CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program.
USAID’s resilience policy, published just this month, provides a common definition of resilience for development actors, a conceptual framework to apply across sectors, and a set of operational principles for strengthening resilience, and recommendations for putting this policy into practice. The policy engages all actors, including USAID and other donors, host governments, and global and local partners to work in concert toward the same goal – to protect and improve wellbeing in the face of shocks and stresses. I’d like to congratulate USAID and its partners on the publication of this policy, which is several years in the making.
There are, of course, glaring illustrations of the lack of resilience in many communities in many countries around the world, not only in terms of food security, but also in terms of water, health, education, and all other aspects of wellbeing. And here to talk about the role of resilience and the role of USAID’s resilience policy in helping address these challenges, are Mia Beers, deputy assistant administrator in USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security, and the agency’s resilience coordinator, and an equally expert panel, including: Beth Bechdol, deputy director-general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; Jenny Marron, interim vice president for global development policy, advocacy, and learning with InterAction; and Sheri-Nouane Duncan-Jones, Somalia mission director with USAID.
I look forward to turning the microphone to DAA Beers shortly and then to our panel, but first a few announcements, and safety first. Emergency exits are behind me into the right and in the corner of our foyer behind you into the right. And if the need arises, and we do not expect it to, please follow my instructions and move toward these exits. Second of all, Q&A. After our panel discussion, we will welcome questions from the audience. And we really do encourage you to submit questions. If you’re in the room, you can scan the QR code here and submit your question that way. If you’re online, go to the “Ask Questions Here” button and submit your question there. And finally, for those of you who are with us in person, we welcome you to stay afterward for a reception, also in our foyer outside the room.
So, onto our program. Without further ado, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the stage Mia Beers, deputy assistant administrator in USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security, and also the agency resilience coordinator. Mia, over to you. (Applause.)
Mia Beers: Thank you so much, Caitlin. And thanks to everyone for joining today in person and also online for this very timely conversation. And, again, thank you to CSIS for hosting us. So I am so excited to share and discuss USAID’s updated resilience policy, which we released a few months ago – a few weeks ago. Feels like months, but it’s a few weeks ago. (Laughter.) So I’m here representing the agency. And this policy, developed with our colleagues from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and inputs across the agency and also from a number of peers, probably a number of you in the audience, and key partners, will be critical for how we work going forward. Particularly against a global backdrop of increasingly frequent and severe shocks, as we see how the world is evolving.
We envision the resilience policy to serve as a key roadmap for the agency’s work over the next decade in helping people, communities, and countries protect their development gains and improve their day-to-day lives. So in the early years following the release of USAID’s first resilience policy and programming guidance in 2012, our work has mainly focused on building resilience to drought among smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the Sahel and Horn of Africa. And many of you that were doing programming back then might remember the joint planning cells and some of the other work that we were helping to coordinate.
But we know that the risk context has since changed globally, with pandemics, accelerated democratic – excuse me – backsliding, and rising conflict and violence, as well as intensifying impacts of climate change. And in response, strengthening resilience as an approach to development has expanded in scope beyond food security outcomes and is really being applied in new sectors, while maintaining a focus on areas of recurrent crises, the agency’s increased efforts to reduce chronic vulnerability and integrate our multisectoral resilience strengthening approaches across USAID programming.
So with new applications in health, education, governance, and many other sectors, we are funding a more diverse set of activities that seek strengthened resilience for individuals, households, communities, and also systems. This new policy, the first update since the release in 2012, seeks to reaffirm the agency’s commitment to strengthening resilience, and reflects a new and increasingly complex and interconnected environment in which all of us work. And this reflection can be seen in the policy’s focus on the importance of integrating humanitarian development and peace assistance for greater resilience and a new conceptual framework that shifts attention from what resilience is to the process of, importantly, designing programs that strengthen across people, communities, and systems.
And at USAID, we see resilience building make a difference in many of the places that we work. So just to give you a couple of examples, in Kenya, for example, USAID resilience investments have helped shape the Kenyan government’s Ending Drought Emergencies Framework. So about 661 million (dollars) of USAID support since 2012 has helped to drive an 8.1 billion (dollar), 10-year government investment commitment into ending drought emergencies in Kenya’s arid northern counties. And this increase in long-term investment by the Kenyan government has also brought greater gains in efficiencies, with government response time to major drought declining we’ve seen from 180 days in 2012, for example, to 21 days in 2021.
Also in Kenya, a Partnership for Resilience and Economic Growth, also known as PREG, has pursued a partnership model in the drylands of Kenya over the last 11 years, reduced food insecurity by 10.4 percentage points, and severe food insecurity by 7.3 percentage points – really ultimately resulting in households exposed to program activities relative to a comparison group. So all that to say, reducing the time for responding in crises and looking at better food security in many of the places that we work. Another example is some of our groundbreaking work in the Sahel, Resilience In the Sahel Enhanced Program, so what we also call as RISE Program, was able to reach 1.9 million of the region’s most vulnerable people and help navigate some of the global compounding shocks, including what we all faced with COVID-19, kind of continued droughts and floods in the area, and overall economic instability.
And our data has shown that, despite all of these types of shocks in the region, households exposed to programming in the RISE I Program were significantly more food secure than other households. So in some of the analysis and evaluation work, the RISE Program and some of the resilience work directly prevented one in five extremely vulnerable households and individuals from experiencing severe food insecurity. So all those to just give examples to some of the policy work and make some tangible links. But we’re – just to finish out on the Sahel – we’re currently implementing RISE II, which will run through 2025, in targeted zones in Burkina Faso and Niger. And this second phase we’re hoping to implement many of the lessons to date and also look at increased focus on the underlying drivers of vulnerability – such as water scarcity, low literacy rates, and a lack of secure land access. So looking forward to seeing the results.
But all that to say, in summary, we all know that humanitarian assistance will not alone prevent nor resolve many of these crises. And we also know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And we know that FAO found that resilience investments can save up to $7 for every dollar spent in resilience. So what we need is greater investments in building resilience, which is why we’re all here today. And this new policy, we believe, on the USAID side will help support and equip people and systems to better anticipate and prepare for shocks and adapt to this ever-changing world. So we hope the conversation today and in the future will forge a stronger path forward together.
So thank you. Looking forward to the panel. (Applause.)
Ms. Welsh: Thank you very much, Mia. It gave us a lot to build from in our panel discussion. And we look forward to returning to a lot of that shortly.
I’m very pleased to welcome to our stage here in person and also online, Beth Bechdol, who’s deputy director-general with the U.N. FAO. Beth is based in Rome, but is joining us today from Indiana, her home state. Jenny Marron, to my right, interim vice president global development policy, advocacy, and learning with InterAction. Jenny is based in D.C. and is joining us here on the stage in D.C. And Sheri-Nouane Duncan-Jones, mission director with USAID Somalia, who is based in Mogadishu but is in Washington today. So we’re very pleased to welcome you to our stage today, Sheri-Nouane.
Again, welcome, everyone. Beth, happy to start with you. Welcome back to CSIS.
Beth Bechdol: Thanks very much. Sorry I couldn’t be there in person but, as you said, I’m literally, as the song goes, back home again in Indiana. (Laughter.) So enjoying a little bit of the summer holiday from Rome. Thanks for having me.
Ms. Welsh: Good. Of course. Of course. Great. Thank you, Beth.
I’ll start with a question about the policy principles – the principles of this USAID resilience policy. How will the U.N. FAO apply the principles of this policy in your everyday work? And we’ll focus on two of those policies. The first policy, which is to use evidence and analysis to better understand risks and improve resilience, and the fifth of those policies, which is advanced HDP coherence. How does FAO plan to use those in your own work?
Ms. Bechdol: Yeah. Thanks so much for the question. And, Caitlin, first let me just congratulate USAID, Mia and all of her colleagues, for the development of this new resilience policy. It really is a critical update and a refresh, as she said, at a time when we should all be more focused on resilience in so many different challenging places. On the topic of evidence and analysis, principle one, this is a space that FAO is fully aligned on, and actually an area of work for which we are quite proud. In fact, some of our analysis, as Mia quoted in her opening comments, have been used in the new policy itself.
Rigorous evidence and analysis really has to serve to inform, I think, all of our programming. And then it is ultimately experience on the ground that has to validate this work. So let me maybe just give a few examples. First is the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or the IPC structure. This is, as we know, the gold standard in assessing acute food insecurity and malnutrition. And some may not know, but the IPC was originally developed 20 years ago by FAO’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit in Somalia. And today it is often cited in reports on Gaza, on Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, and so many other places.
Its prioritization of the most acute food insecure areas allows us to now implement emergency responses as well as medium- and long-term resilience building interventions. And USDA – USAID, sorry – USAID has also funded FAO Data in Emergencies, DIEM, information system. This one is driven by more regularly collected primary data. Its objective is to understand the impact of shocks in food crisis contexts and inform decision making in support of agricultural livelihoods. There are other important collaborations between FAO and USAID that are focused on resilience analysis and management as well as risk identification. This includes our work together in the center for transboundary animal diseases, ECTAD, where we focus together on the threats to human health from zoonoses and antimicrobial resistance.
But let me close on principle one by just saying, evidence really is key. And this is something that has been lacking in many of our collective assessments of resilient, focused interventions. And I think this is something that FAO is really stepping up our own assessment and analysis of. We’ve come a long way in the last decade, but we have to make sure that we can better clearly demonstrate the impact, the delivery, and the cost effectiveness of so many of these interventions. Because, as we know, it’s really the cost effectiveness and the interaction and intersection with, I think, reduced and more constrained funding and financing that’s really a priority.
Let me very quickly close on principle five. I really think that FAO is uniquely placed to contribute to furthering the HDP nexus approach. We are not a humanitarian organization. We are a specialized technical agency. But we have something really crucial to offer in these emergency and crisis contexts. And these are agricultural, livestock, fishing interventions – all of which are fundamentally about resilience-building in the midst of a crisis. And I think it’s clear that both types of responses can be done in tandem or parallel. We have to advocate for this HDP nexus approach at all levels. And this is something that FAO is taking on very seriously, including with governments, with donors, and also within the U.N. system, and with our NGO partners.
It’s this nexus approach that we really should all be considering as we take on issues of climate security, water, disaster risk reduction, anticipatory action, social protection, and even durable solutions to forced displacement. But I think also, Caitlin, one closing point on this question. It’s really time for all of us to have some more honest conversations around the nexus with one another about roles, responsibilities, and our own unique value propositions. Too often being in the nexus can also contribute to increased competition among many of us as partners.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you, Beth. We might get back to that exact point a bit later in our conversation. I’d like to ask you now about something else that’s emphasized in this policy, which is the importance of addressing the needs of the most vulnerable, and also making sure that local communities are invested in the outcomes of our work. How does FAO approach these things?
Ms. Bechdol: First, I think this too is another very important point. And we have to acknowledge that really there’s not any kind of one-size-fits-all approach for how we address the most vulnerable or these localized situations. Risk and conflict assessments must acknowledge and integrate capacities and knowledge of local actors. And so local knowledge and ownership really serve to be at the heart of resilient and sustainable processes. And I think we should all fundamentally admit that local partners best understand local challenges and also the solutions that are most workable.
So two very quick examples of where FAO has taken this approach on. First is the work that we have done on disaster risk reduction and social cohesion between refugees and host communities in Bangladesh. Here, we have empowered local community-based organizations to take the lead regarding agriculture risk management, especially in the context of climate-related disasters. We provided these different organizations with technical support to design, manage, and coordinate emergency and resilience activities through both aggregation centers and technology fairs. These aggregation centers connected smallholder farmers to one another so that they could share farming techniques, and they could also utilize more digital service providers to secure fair market selling prices. And the technology fairs involve government officials and other groups, and ultimately introduced farmers to new technologies and practices.
The second example is one that’s, I think, quite well known to many, probably, in this audience, which is the use of Dimitra Clubs as a community mechanism to disseminate good agricultural practices. And here, I would just point out the work we’ve done in Mali. These Dimitra Clubs, again, I assume everyone is well familiar, are self-created groups of women, men, and young men who come together to identify, analyze, and discuss common problems, and to find local solutions. In Mali, there are over 1,400 of these clubs in 250 or more rural communities. Six hundred and eighty of them are women’s clubs. Six hundred and fifty-five are men’s. And another 60 are mixed. And, importantly, 45 percent of the club’s members are young people under the age of 35.
And so here, we started by focusing on the needs of local authorities, plus the communities, plus technical advisors and services, youth organizations, and NGOs. And using the club structure, you’re able to strengthen the capacities of all of these different groups because the club serves as a community mechanism for disseminating best practices – whether that’s on agroforestry, on fisheries, on nutrition. And ultimately, maybe even more importantly in some ways, also serves as an advocate for change in local governance matters. So these and other types of similar activities, I think, really promote a sense of localized ownership and commitment from communities, and obviously bring a very strong and important focus on women’s involvement in those changes as well.
Ms. Welsh: Thanks, Beth. That’s a great example with very, very impressive numbers. So thanks for sharing those details. The last question that I’ll ask you will be the first question that I ask Jenny, but I’ll start with you, Beth. And this is about something that comes through very clearly in USAID’s updated resilience policy, which is about the importance of integration. The policy describing the fact that the impacts of shocks and stresses span sectors, and that sources of resilience in one sector may come from many different sectors. So I’m wondering, from the perspective of FAO, and then from InterAction and your member organizations, what do you see are the barriers to cross-sector integration, that the policy promotes, and then how is FAO working to overcome those barriers?
Ms. Bechdol: I’m very much looking forward to hearing Jenny’s comments on this topic as well. (Laughter.) But let me just say, for me personally, I think this is one of the most critical issues today, especially at a time when we realize that just, frankly, old approaches aren’t getting the job done to bring down food insecurity levels. And at the same time, resources are becoming more and more constrained, especially with many of our collective traditional donors around the world. And so it’s always essential, I think, to collectively focus on meeting immediate needs. But we also have to work hard to protect the resilience gains that we’ve made, while building even more resilience to the future shocks and stresses that just continue to keep coming at us.
Unfortunately, from my point of view, I don’t believe that many of our own institutions, the global aid architecture, and our old ways of working are structured in the right way to meet today’s challenges. So maybe to be more specific, of the 282 million people who are acutely food insecure, at least as of 2023 – so this is IPC 3, 4 and 5 – from across 59 different countries, over three-quarters of these individuals are farmers, livestock herders, fishermen, and women. So they are living in rural communities and villages and they depend on agriculture. So the bottom line here is that farmers around the world today are now really the most vulnerable. Yet, of the global total humanitarian spend to try to address these numerous conflicts and crises, only 4 percent of the total funding goes to support emergency agricultural assistance.
So put those two data points as our bookends – 4 percent of the funding, when three-quarters to 80 percent of the people most in need are related to agriculture in some way. So our models and our structures, I would argue, are just not any longer supporting the right balance or mix of interventions. Do we have the right model? Are we supporting the right interventions? I think agricultural aid is something that needs more attention, alongside and in balance with more traditional commodity-based humanitarian aid. It is what I think can both feed people and also support recovery and resilience.
Other barriers, before I close, are just tied to resources. Often funding from traditional donors is not flexible for these types of context-specific approaches. Funding is still tied to a specific geography or a particular program. And I think, finally, we also have to move from pilots, small-scale approaches, to delivery at scale. And this is something that FAO has been able to do now in some of our largest country programs. In fact, FAO’s top three country programs now are Afghanistan, Somalia, and South Sudan, where we operate portfolios in the hundreds of millions of dollars and touch all provinces or regions, and deliver seeds, vaccines, and other tools to millions of farmers.
So on these types of issues – Caitlin, I think you’ve heard me say these points before – but FAO really is trying to step up and be more vocal about these points, to begin this dialog with donors, with other U.N. partners, with NGOs, and others about how we work and, frankly, how we invest differently. But I think we all know that old habits are very hard to break, even inside our own organization. It really does. It takes new messages. It takes more streamlined procedures and processes, more innovative funding models and, frankly, just some amount of culture change as well.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you so much, Beth. We will return to many of these points in the rest of our panel discussion. But happy to turn right now to Jenny Marron, interim vice president for global development policy, advocacy, and learning with InterAction.
Jennifer Marron: It’s a mouthful.
Ms. Welsh: Same question to you.
Ms. Marron: Thank you so much, Caitlin, for having me today. And thank you to USAID for this policy.
The InterAction community has been engaging with USAID on this policy in the course of its rewrite. And we’re really excited to see how all of the pieces have come together. And I think the policy gets it exactly right on the need for the cross-sectoral integration. I think Beth has it exactly right – (laughs) – on some of the barriers, right? Some of the barriers are not new, but they are still worth mentioning. People don’t live in silos. And I think, again, the policy gets that spot on. You know, looking at the communities, where people are, getting to the root causes, and saying, well, what are we trying to solve? What are the risks that get in the way of that? And then how do we get to the outcomes?
The problem is our funding and our structure does live in silos. And USAID has been doing a great job of finding innovative ways around that. I think the leadership councils are really helpful. Seems like they’re helpful within the agency. But at the end of the day, it’s how do we make sure that the funding actually gets to where it needs to be? To me, one thing that InterAction is thinking about and supporting is, how can we support that flexibility? How can we support localization? Again, comes through very strongly in the strategy. And I think the changes that are being made to try to support funding and decision making getting to local communities supports this core idea of resilience. And so that’s something that we engage around.
We also think – or, at the end of the day, to get this flexibility there needs to be a lot of trust in the system. There needs to be a lot of trust with Congress in order to provide this flexibility. And so that’s also where data is really important. Showing that these approaches work. Showing that these integrated approaches work. Showing that the funding is adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Showing that there is transparency and adaptive management – again, comes through in the policy – but being able to show where we have made pivots and changes. And I think one thing that InterAction tries to do is engage and have our members also show where they’ve been able to make changes in adapting to local conditions.
We have also tried to – engaging with USAID on a variety of the policies that have been developed over the past couple of years – do try to take this cross-sectoral approach. One example of this is as we engaged with the climate strategy development, which, of course, connects to the resilience piece, you know, really bringing in members from across different sectors to make sure they’re providing that feedback. And I just want to give one example on the importance of flexibility and the way in which this resilience policy – maybe we can use this resilience policy to emphasize the need for these things.
So one of our members, Mercy Corps, has a Feed the Future Program in Ethiopia that’s really been focused on disaster risk management, livelihoods, nutrition. It started in 2020. It’s 2020 through 2025. In 2022, droughts hit. OK, there needs to be some pivots and some changes. And USAID was able to make use of crisis modifiers. USAID has the tools. And being able to use those tools allowed there to actually – them to layer and sequence humanitarian assistance, direct support, with market-based support to actually help continue to build resilience in that case, right? And so USAID has the tools, and we continue to advocate with them and with our members to make good use of those tools.
Ms. Welsh: Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Slightly different topic. Let’s talk about the definition and then the measurement of resilience. And you and I were chatting earlier about the fact that resilience is one of those things that different organizations can define differently, even different parts of different organizations can define differently, which then presents challenges for measurement. So how does InterAction plan to approach these challenges?
Ms. Marron: I don’t have any secret sauce for you on this one. (Laughter.) I think it is a challenge that we are all still working through. InterAction is not an implementing organization. We are not directly measuring resilience. But one thing I think we’re really excited about to work on with our members and with USAID is where we can identify shared indicators, right? I think that as USAID moves into the question of measuring working with the NGO community – and how are things already being measured in programming I think is really important. I think, back to the concept of localization, using community scorecards. I know that that is being built in, in some cases. Participatory measurement being a particularly relevant point here if we are really looking at community resilience.
And again, the policy points this out, but the need for long-term evaluation. You know, we have a member, Catholic Relief Services, who found that five years after a resilience program that they did, 80 percent of households were still reporting better ability to respond and cope, in Nigeria, to shocks and stressors. And so there’s probably some objective measures that you can look toward on levels of foods insecurity, but there’s also the how is the community feeling about its own ability to respond, right? And that’s something you can only find so much of in the moment. We have to have that ability to go back and measure. A couple of other areas we’re interested in exploring are thinking about how social cohesion, social networks, psychosocial wellbeing factor into community conceptions and measurements of resilience.
Ms. Welsh: OK. Thank you. Last question for you, Jenny, is about the variety of sectors that your member organizations work on. This policy is meant to apply not only to the food and agriculture sectors, but to all the sectors that – again, that your organizations are working on. So can you speak a bit about how organizations that are working in health, and water, and education, et cetera, will benefit from this policy?
Ms. Marron: Yeah. I think that we could see – again, as I mentioned, we had some sessions as the policy was being developed to provide feedback. And in doing so, we tried to get members from various sectors. And some of our feedback was really about, OK, we do want to engage more in these conversations about resilience. We would like to see how you think that this looks. And a policy can only have so many pages and so many examples, so but I think there’s a real appetite for members to engage in that – in that conversation, to see a little bit more concretely – particularly in areas of health, and wash, climate – I mean climate, I think there’s already a lot of good connection that is happening. But I think there’s a lot of excitement about the possibility of resilience as a frame that doesn’t just apply to food security. It’s a frame that applies to communities and what they need. And so far, we’re getting very positive feedback and looking forward to engaging more.
Ms. Welsh: Awesome. Thank you, Jenny. Great to have you here. And, again, we’ll return to a lot of these concepts in our Q&A, I’m sure.
And finally, Sheri-Nouane Duncan-Jones, very pleased to welcome you to our stage. Again, Sheri-Nouane is mission director with USAID Somalia, based in Mogadishu. We’re very fortunate to have her here with us in Washington today. So, welcome.
Sheri-Nouane Duncan-Jones: Thank you.
Ms. Welsh: And I’d like to start with a question that is kind of down in – you know, gets to the nuts and bolts, but also very, very important, I think, having to do with this policy. Which is that many of the sectors that we’re referring to have legislation that mandates certain approaches. There are policies that are already in place. There are country plans. There are measurement tools. And I think that that’s very clear, for example, in the example of Feed the Future, in our water work, similar structures already in place. And then you have a policy that was years in the development but that’s launched this month that’s smart and succinct. And does it pose challenges when it’s overlaid on existing approaches, like the ones that I just mentioned? So if you could speak to this at a USAID level, but also from your experience in Somalia.
Ms. Duncan-Jones: Thank you. Well, it’s really nice to be here. This is a very nice change from Mogadishu, Somalia. (Laughter.)
And the policy is a unifier. And so, yes, we are bound to so many different types of legislation, so many different types of reporting, so many different types of measurement as well. And I think resilience offers us an opportunity to take a look at this across the different sectors and look at how this policy unifies all of the different areas, but also resilience is just good core development practice. And so for Somalia, it is a lens for us to be able to look at this in the context on the ground and to take a look at how we would assess the crisis situation or the humanitarian situation or the development situation – and the security situation in the context of Somalia – and then design or development in humanitarian solutions.
And really, for us it’s this waves of shocks and droughts and this increasing frequency and complexity. The USAID mission directors are meeting this week, and yesterday we had a session where we talked about the increasing volume and complexity of risks and fragility that the world is going through. And for USAID, about 80 percent of the countries that we work in are either fragile, in conflict, or in a vulnerable state. And so this resilience policy really provides us a very good format to be able to take a look at analyzing and understanding all those risks across the different sectors, and allows us some of that movement to be able to adapt, and to pivot, and to take a look at how we can have collective planning and execution working with our partners, working with communities, and really taking a look at how that can serve as a vehicle for the sequencing, layering, and integration.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you. Thanks for that – for that explanation.
The policy talks about resilience at many different levels – household level, community level, systems level. I’d like to talk to you about this, systems-level resilience and how USAID Somalia is approaching that challenge and the types of investments you’re making to improve – to improve resilience at that level.
Ms. Duncan-Jones: So systems can be considered at many different levels, and so I’d like to just give a little bit of an analogy of how we apply this in Somalia. So I’d like to think about supporting a resilient system, and our investments, and thinking of this a little bit like as a concept of repair, protect, and build.
So let’s think about this in terms of repairing, protecting, and building a net. And I guess maybe net is – we can think about safety nets, but I don’t want to think about this as a safety net; let’s just think about it as a net. So let’s look at repairing the net.
So this is immediate support that we’re looking at helping prevent households from falling off the net, and this is where our humanitarian interventions come in. And this is represented perhaps like by a cash transfer that helps prevent a source of resilience from collapsing during a shock. So this individual household-level repairing and making sure that we’re putting into place some sort of – some sort of immediate, immediate life-saving assistance and then protecting the net. So this is more short-term support where we’re going to focus more on the existing sources of resilience.
So here we’re going to take a look at household resiliency programming. And we’ve done some really interesting research in Somalia where we’ve taken a look at sources of resilience, and I have a whole ‘nother presentation that we can share with folks, and we have a fantastic partner that we’re working with to collect some of this information. So we’d be very happy to share this. And for example, this is where we’re working with households or the subsistence farmer to better adapt the way that they farm or how they are responding to droughts, and also to allow such that there would be an income stream after a shock occurs.
And then building the net. So then building the net, these are the medium- to long-term effects where we’re looking at strengthening those sources of resilience and also building and connecting to new sources of resilience. So I just want to give a couple of examples, if I may.
So in Somalia, we’re actually working with FAO to right now rehabilitate a canal system. And this is in Jowhar, which is in the middle of the country along the Shebelle River, and this is the breadbasket of Somalia. Right now this system is subject to so many droughts and so many floods. And the farmers that live along this river are – belong to most of the minority clans in Somalia, and they are forced to move away from these areas because of the flooding, and so they are the highest population of some of the IDP camps in Somalia. But what we’re doing is that we were looking to rehabilitate a canal system. And this canal system is going to store water, it’s going to reduce the floods, and also it will work to release the excess water back into the river during the dry times so then we can better have more reliable irrigation during droughts. And so when this is completed and when we have some – the system is completed, we will provide over 300,000 Somalis dependency – who are dependent on this irrigation system a more reliable and predictable outcome to their harvest. And I just want to also add in that in this process we’re also working with the communities on their public participation, on ensuring that we have good governance of this new resource, and working together with the different clans and communities to manage it.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you.
And I have a question that’s already come in online that I think will build on some of those – some of those examples you just provided. But before I turn to questions from our audience, one last question for you, Sheri-Nouane. The resilience policy notes – and this is a quote – that “resilience is a national security imperative.” What is the relationship between resilience in Somalia to U.S. national security interests? I think it’s always important to define what we mean when we’re linking a development outcome with U.S. national security interests. So in your case, how do you make that connection?
Ms. Duncan-Jones: In Somalia, we’re operating under the three Ds. And so that’s diplomacy, defense, and development. And so as part of this vision, we’re tackling these shared – these shared challenges. And this includes security challenges, this includes climate challenges, and this also includes food insecurity challenges. So resilience plays such an important role because the efforts that we put towards resilience are going to help us achieve and strengthen our national security and the security of Somalia.
And so protecting the United States from terrorist organizations is a key point of our administration and their strategy. And I just want to give a couple of examples of how in Somalia the environment – the security environment meshes very much with climate shocks.
And so the relationship between resiliency and the national security is pretty linear, and we’ve seen that through the lens of al-Shabaab, which is al-Qaida’s wealthiest terrorist organization. And in Somalia, communities have been under al-Shabaab rule for decades. And as we are liberating territory from al-Shabaab and giving communities back their land, their towns, we’re setting them up for better resilience. We’re providing them with the tools and the skills to better link to the systems and/or the larger government for resilience.
And why I mention this is because there will always be these climate shocks in Somalia. We just know that there’s going to be a certain level of humanitarian assistance need in Somalia over the years. And so this security context is compounded by some of the shocks that we see over time with the droughts and the floods, and these lead to massive waves of displacement. We have one of the largest populations of internal displaced people in Somalia. And so we are working together to ensure that our coordinated efforts are supporting the communities and as they face, you know, this future in Somalia.
And so we’re looking forward to supporting them and being able to also ensure that they’re integrated into society. You had mentioned about social resiliency or social cohesion and we found that that’s one of the main sources of resilience in Somalia and that ensuring that as communities are able to get back into their towns that they have that social cohesion, that they’re integrated back, and that therefore these populations and particularly some of the younger populations are integrated and they’re receiving services and they’re happy and they’re less likely to contribute to increased grievances and other kinds of protracted crises in their communities.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you. Thank you for that response.
I will turn now to questions from the audience. We’ve received some great questions so far. But if you have one and you’d like to submit it please scan the QR code if you’re in the room or submit it at the “ask questions here” button on our webpage.
I’ll ask two questions that came in online. Then I’ll turn to someone in the audience who I know has a good question. But let me just state both of these questions. Then I’ll open it up to Beth and Jenny and Sheri-Nouane to answer.
So, again, these two questions. This first one is from Robert Paarlberg, who joins us online from Maine. And this is about slow onset threats to livelihoods from climate change, saying that these slow onset threats don’t get as much attention as the sudden – as sudden shocks but they threaten millions and tend to be irreversible.
Does USAID – and then I’ll extend this to FAO and then InterAction’s member organizations – have proven programs to help those threatened to find an alternative livelihood and the slow onset threats that he mentions are saltwater intrusion, long periods of extreme heat, disappearing fish stocks, et cetera.
And then the second question online that I’ll read and offer to Beth, Jenny, and Sheri-Nouane is about the role of traditional markets and this comes from Caroline Smith DeWaal who’s joining us online from Maryland, and Caroline asks during COVID we learned about the importance of traditional markets for food and assuring access to nutritious foods for many consumers in the Global South. Can your panel comment on how traditional markets are supported in their planning for resilience?
So no need to answer both of those questions. If you’d like to answer one or the other that’s great. But, Beth, I’ll turn to you first and then to Jenny and then Sheri-Nouane. And we have just about, you know, a minute or two and then we’ll – per answer and then we’ll move on.
Ms. Bechdol: Yeah. Sure. Maybe I’ll take the second one on the role of traditional markets and, certainly, the way the question was framed was correct in that I think COVID-19 especially as a global pandemic really revealed the fragility and the sensitivities and even in some places the brokenness of our global what we call agrifood systems.
And so for us we are very much integrating into much of our programming I think a renewed focus on value chains and value chains that are increasingly focused more on the types of crops and commodities, especially if you take someplace like the continent of Africa, sub-Saharan – it may be Southeast Asia. Maybe more of the orphan crops, underutilized crops, commodities and products that are not just the staple crops that really dominate kind of global commodity trade but are one, first and foremost, unique, traditional, maybe even indigenous to a particular country or region.
Also have climate resilient properties and also then have increased nutritional viability and this is very much supported by the U.S. government and USAID has been very active in supporting a new initiative called the Vision for Adaptive Crops and Soils, and we and the CGIAR and the African Union and a number of other partners are active in trying to really take this on and address it because, again, I think we recognize that traditional markets’ local value chains really need to be prioritized.
Ms. Welsh: Great. Thank you so much, Beth.
Jenny, over to you.
Ms. Marron: Yeah, thank you so much.
I think I want to just offer an example on the question of slow onset crises and climate change because I think that is so, so important and just points to the way that we need to be building climate adaptation and resilience into programming across the board because spot on these things are a little bit slower and then they can result in the longer-term or the bigger shocks.
In Catholic Relief Services one of our members had a program in Malawi that really worked to include nature resource management into its program alongside with savings and marketing groups, household incomes, looking at food and nutrition, and what they found by doing that program was that 19 of the 24 communities that they worked in when there was then a historic drought just two years after the program concluded – 19 of 24 communities didn’t actually need additional assistance, right, because they were able to build in the watershed management, the resource management, and help communities then be able to deal with the shocks that were going to be coming.
Ms. Welsh: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks.
And then, Sheri-Nouane, over to you, and then I’ll turn to two audience members for your questions.
Ms. Duncan-Jones: Well, just to add on to some of the work that my colleagues spoke about in some of their countries where they’re working, in Somalia I can say that we’re working on drought-resistant seeds and working to ensure that we are linking farmers with village savings and loans programs so we can have a rotating source of small income in case of an emergency.
For the fisher folk we’re also working to ensure that fisher folk have ways to improve their catch and their supply chains for saving their catch, and then we’re also working at the systems level for fish – not fish cooperatives but fish suppliers and so that way their supply and their – not manufacturing, their – when they’re collecting the fish and processing it on – processing – fish processing. Thank you.
And so we’re working out ways that we can improve their demand so that way they will also want to have more of the fisher folks’ fish as part of their product to push on through the system. And so we’re working – it doesn’t really answer the question from the audience around the slow onset but it’s, again, just ensuring that we have those resilient systems like in the agriculture sector, in the fish sector, to maintain livelihoods and some income.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you.
Q: Hi. Thank you so much, CSIS. I’m Ovidiu with ACDI/VOCA and AV Ventures.
I think it’s a wonderful effort on the resilience side. As we are witnessing the events in Kenya on the Gen Z protests I am looking forward as another potential source of distress and shocks, which is the lack of access to economic opportunities and jobs mainly.
I would like to ask what your thoughts are as we move forward and a lot of the very youthful population in Africa enters the workforce in an increasing number. How can we factor in support for youth in terms of entrepreneurship and also support for venture development so that we can actually together create those ventures that create jobs and opportunities and reduce this shock stressors of different nature?
Thank you.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you very much. And is Susanna Amari in the room? Great or – OK. Thank you.
Q: Hi. I’m Suzanna Amari. I’m the director of the Ideal Activity, which is run by Save the Children, and you might know some of the associate awards that are underneath the Food Security Network umbrella that we’ve run.
But I wanted to ask about some of the success factors that have been enabling kind of the breaking down of silos both for the nexus and multi donor funding in Somalia, thinking about BRICS and SomReP and some of these really successful resilience consortium that have been operating in Somalia.
You know, what’s really enabled that to happen?
Ms. Welsh: Thank you very much. And those will be our last questions from the audience and I also want to say this will be a lightning round of answers so relatively short answers before I turn to my colleague Noam Unger for closing remarks.
But, Beth, first to you, and then Jenny and then Sheri-Nouane.
Ms. Bechdol: Sure. Thanks, and maybe on this one I’ll take the first question on youth engagement.
Coming from a multi-generational family farm here in Indiana where I think we even are really concerned about the future of the next generation being involved in agriculture this is something that is very much a global issue that needs to be addressed and I have some pretty strong opinions on how agriculture and those of us who are part of it take it on.
First, I think we have to start promoting and talking about agriculture in a much different way. You know, it’s a sector and an industry that oftentimes is just viewed as being dirty. You don’t make very much money. It takes too much hard work.
And today, when you look at how innovation and technology, regardless of what country you’re talking about, their agricultural economy, and there’s so many, I think, exciting and enticing opportunities to draw young people, especially using digital tools and technology to bring them in.
So for us two ways. We’ve got a farmer field school program platform that we are really trying to pivot to being much more youth oriented to really engage in innovation and digital tools and data and other things that will bring them in and attract them to these kinds of economic opportunities.
And the last thing is for four years running now FAO has hosted an event called the World Food Forum in Rome where we bring youth from all over the world to Rome for a week in October around World Food Day. We have an investment forum. We have science and innovation topics that are all tied there – venture capital, pitch contests.
And so we’re really trying to do our part, I think, to really showcase and demonstrate that there’s great opportunity for young people to be a part of agrifood systems.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you so much, Beth.
Jenny, over to you.
Ms. Marron: I really endorse everything that Beth just said and I would just add that our members routinely do build in youth advisory councils in as part of their programming. I know a great example from Save the Children that does that as part of their resilience programming. And so I think you’re spot on with asking for where that is being built in.
And I think it also speaks to it’s not just the economics and the livelihood but it’s also the governance and I think, you know, the questions around democracy and governance also need to get wrapped into this conversation as well.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you. Wonderful. Last word with you.
Ms. Duncan-Jones: And just to address the question from the floor, in Somalia we’re working to collaborate and break down barriers at a number of different levels – I would say within USAID, even within our own house, ensuring that we’re collaborating, that we’re not siloed, that we’re not competing with our partners. Bilaterally with our partners, same thing. We’re building into our programs a certain element and requirement of having to sequence, layer, and integrate and work on resilience with other partners and ensuring that we have partner meetings where we’re bringing them together similarly to share experiences, talk about it.
We’re doing that not only at the partner level but we’re also doing at the partner level in geographic areas, and then partnering with our U.N. colleagues to discuss how they’re doing area-based geographic specialization. And then the government of Somalia also now is very interested in how they can maximize and leverage all of the resources available in the country and looking at how we can use this as a frame for coordination.
But I would just say that it is about breaking down barriers and limiting that competition because even within USAID, within partners in the country, across donors, there’s a lot of competition. So it’s about a little bit of a mindset and a culture shift of working together.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you so much.
And I’m very pleased to welcome to the stage my colleague and friend Noam Unger, who is not only a senior fellow in the project on prosperity and development at CSIS, but he launched just last week one of CSIS’ newest programs which is the sustainable development and resilience initiative.
Noam, over to you for some closing remarks.
Noam Unger: Thank you so much. I figure since it was just launched last week it’s safe in saying it is the newest.
Ms. Welsh: The newest. (Laughter.)
Mr. Unger: I’m not sure. I don’t know if that’s true, actually.
So hi, I’m Noam. Thank you so much for this tremendous discussion and the tee up, Mia, as well, and more importantly for the deeper work that the agency has been doing to develop and then launch and then forthcomingly execute against this policy.
So there were a few points that I wanted to tease out in particular and, Beth, you began with this on the need for really more honest conversations around the humanitarian development peacebuilding nexus and I actually think that this policy demonstrates publicly a level of struggle and wrestling that’s been happening for a long time within USAID on that front.
And I worked at USAID several different times but, you know, most recently several years ago as director of policy, and have seen the churn for a number of years and I think this policy – I encourage anyone who has not really read it to actually sit down and read it because it really does wrestle with these issues and actually then comes through to the other side with some real recommendations and a framing that I think is quite helpful for everyone working in this space, not just those within government.
There was discussion on the need for more flexible funding and delivery at scale. I think Jenny – or Beth, you talked about that. I think Jenny also reaffirmed that and others. Part of the reason this conversation is so exciting is because precisely as you were saying some of the ways of working on this are just no longer working and the world is changing and there’s a shifting landscape for global development itself and global development support interventions, and, Sheri-Nouane, you articulated this very well.
I think that this kind of policy if and when implemented can do tremendous good. When you think about the crisis – the global food security crisis prompted in large part by the – Russia’s attack on Ukraine, prompting a focus by the U.S. Congress to come in with a pretty sizable and important supplemental for U.S. global development support, not just in Ukraine but for the global ramifications of that crisis and, importantly, a huge component of that supplemental was on the development side of funding, not just only what we’re used to seeing for congressional supplementals, which is on the humanitarian side of funding.
That’s incredibly important on the resources side, but then the agency or the agencies working on this have to come back and actually apply it in a very integrated way and I think, Sheri-Nouane, you were saying that this policy is a unifier and I think that’s right, and good policy should be unifiers and that essentially resilience is good core development practice I think is what you said, and that’s how I view it, too.
I mean, at its core we’re talking about good integrated development, and so in many ways this policy I see as a win for an integrated development approach conversation that has been happening for years. It’s a win for and a further affirmation of discussions around adaptive management, around shock responsive programming and approaches, and around systems thinking and this is a policy that really brings it together with some practical recommendations.
One of the recommendations in the policy is also around pursuing a campaign approach to institutional barriers. This is a self-aware policy. It’s not saying, like, here’s the way to do it and we can get it all done.
It’s saying there are real barriers and we actually have to tackle those barriers in a really concerted way and both internally and working with partners, and at CSIS one of the reasons we’ve launched this sustainable development and resilience initiative is because externally to the government there’s a real recognition of the need to bring these threads together.
The Global South is incredibly important to U.S. economic and security interests and the issues that we’re talking about with regard to resilience and adaptation are rising on the agenda of those partners and potential partners in an era of geostrategic competition, in an era of mounting climate impacts – climate change impacts. And so for decades to come we need new and different ways to wrestle with these issues and I think that this resilience policy really does a lot of service in helping to point the way.
And so I want to thank our USAID colleagues. I want to thank all of you who have been a part of this conversation shaping these policies and all of you for shaping the future implementation.
And since we’ve just launched this initiative at CSIS we stand ready to partner as well on some of those calls for – there’s calls in the policy around future research areas. There’s calls for a sort of broader ecosystem tackling these barriers, and I think we can do it.
So thank you.
Ms. Welsh: Thank you, Noam. A perfect way to tie together so many of the themes of this policy.
With that, I want to thank again Mia Beers and Sheri-Nouane Duncan-Jones from USAID, Beth Bechdol with the U.N. FAO, Jenny Marron with InterAction and Noam with CSIS.
Thank you so much for your remarks. This event was made possible from the support of the American people from USAID under the Feed the Future initiative. So I want to give special thanks to the USAID REFS Bureau for your strong partnership in today’s event.
I thank my team, Anita Kirschenbaum, Zane Swanson, Emma Dodd, and especially U.S. – sorry, CSIS’s excellent External Relations team for producing today’s event and our audience in person and online.
Thank you so much for joining us. If you’re in person please stay for our reception outside. Thank you.
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