Building Community-Led Resilience in South Sudan: Lessons from Policy LINK
Hear how Policy LINK is empowering communities to advocate for their own priorities.
Donors and implementing partners (IPs) increasingly recognize the importance of empowering communities to advocate for and lead their own resilience activities as a way to not only advance USAID’s localization goals but also sustain development outcomes. Yet programmatic evidence on how donors and IPs can effectively put communities at the center of resilience programming, and aid effectiveness more broadly, remains lacking.
During this Learning Event, Jeffrey Campbell, from the Policy LINK team, will discuss how the program used a participatory planning process to empower communities to advocate for their own priorities. He will also share the benefits of this community-centered approach for resilience policymaking and programming decisions, as identified through the program’s recent South Sudan Outcome Harvest. Policy LINK applied this Outcome Harvest evaluation methodology to uncover and understand the intended and unintended outcomes that came from the Policy LINK five-step process for facilitating and strengthening a community-led resilience agenda.
Key findings for donors and implementing partners include:
- the engagement process improved communities’ collective understanding and articulation of shocks, their needs, and that shocks and stresses can be overcome and addressed with their own contributions;
- communities’ mindset of their role in development efforts shifted from passive to active agents of change; and
- communities’ advocated for their needs by sharing their action plans with IPs, which led to the experimental adoption of resilience approaches.
Event Agenda
- Opening Remarks
- Brief Overview of the Operational Context
- Brief Overview of the Five-Step Participatory Planning Process
- Brief Description of the Outcome Harvest Methodology and Analysis Process: Why Policy LINK Chose This method and What We Hoped to Get Out of It
- Deeper Dive into Some of the Key Findings of the Outcome Harvest Report
- Conclusions/Observations on Why the Participatory Approach Is Cost-Effective and Adds Value to Resilience Programming
- Q and A