 Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome to CSIS. My name is Jennifer Cook. I direct the Africa program here at CSIS We're here today to launch a new report Which is the state of African resilience understanding the dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation This is the first annual report of the resilient Africa network Which is a partnership that's generously supported by USAID Through its US global development lab and the higher education solutions network Uganda's Macarreira University leads the partnership But it's also joined by 15 African universities from West Eastern the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa to Lane Universities disaster resilience leadership academy is a partner as is Stanford University and you'll hear from some of those partners here today and CSIS of course The network has been brought together really to better understand through analysis community engagement multidisciplinary collaboration and testing What drives vulnerability in some of Africa's chronically vulnerable Communities and what factors or combination of factors can make these communities more resilient and where are the openings for intervention to help build those aspects and those dimensions of resilience And have a real impact on on improving Well-being within these communities the Africa program is has really been privileged to be a part of this network and Is it's a real pleasure to host today's event to profile some of the early findings and kind of where the network is going from here a Couple of reasons I think for me that has has been this made this so important first This is the collaboration of this new range of players African universities we don't get as much interaction here in Washington I think as we as we could with this kind of rich resource within Africa a new range of players faculty and and students as well Bringing real scientific rigor and academic analysis to this To this problem of resilience and development Promoting a culture of innovation within these universities Getting getting students and faculty to be thinking outside the box to be Creative to kind of let loose on on real problems that the communities around them are grappling with And and focusing on real-time problems So this is I think it's it's a great moment for the universities But really what's important in this partnership is that communities are at the center of this and it's really community perspectives community capacities and community feedback That really drives the agenda of the ran across these very very different communities Working with these universities so we're gonna hear as well during the course of this some of the innovative ways that the resilient African Network is engaging with communities We're gonna have some hard copies of the report available after the session But the report is available online and over time This has become something of a living interactive document So this this first report offers an overview a big a big picture of the structure And some of the early findings of ran, but this is going to be continuously updated The labs themselves are coming out with more detailed reports on their findings and we'll be looking Next year Kind of with a progress update, but I hope you'll look online as this kind of develops into a much more interactive Website as well We're gonna start today with a first panel just to introduce the ran where it fits in USAID's US Global Development Plan What kind of some of the expectations of the ran have been and then we're gonna turn to The chief of party for the resilient Africa Network to talk a little bit about Where the ran is going and explain the broad outlines in our second panel We're gonna delve in a little bit more on some of the initial findings The methodology the analysis we have two of the Resilient Africa labs leaders with us here today, and then we have Jim fishkin from Stanford University Who's gonna talk about this innovative way of engaging? communities, so I'd like to welcome you all and especially our Panelists from who have come from very far away And we're gonna open up with Dave Ferguson Who's director of the Center for Development Innovation at the US Global Development Lab at USAID To tell us a little bit about where where this fits in what USAI is doing With in partnership with universities Both both here in the United States and in Africa And then we're gonna turn to William Bazeu who is kind of the grand chess master in this whole partnership At he's dean of school of public health at Macquarie University chief of party for the ran and it's him that really Drives this and keeps all the pieces moving so Dave why don't we turn to you first and Then we'll turn to William and we'll open up for brief questions and answers before moving to the next panel So Dave welcome and thanks Well, thank you very much I appreciate the intro the kind introduction and the great thanks the Center for strategic and international studies for hosting us here today And helping us launch this report and the tremendous insights and efforts that went into making it The report that caught my attention as I first started into it when I saw a draft just a few months ago and said where's Where's the next version? I want it now because I think the insights in this report that come from Working with communities directly and in a way that enables the Demands and the needs that they have to come out is really critical in this work and it is central To what has made this go. I'd like to give a special thanks to the resilient Africa Network Secretariat and our ran chief of party dr. Bazeu For his leadership in making this happen a special thanks to key Lou the co-pi for the ran and director of Tulane disaster Resilience Leadership Academy and Dr. James Fishkin from Stanford University the Center for deliberative Democracy both of you have contributed in ways that have enabled this report to happen and it wouldn't have happened without you So thank you at USAID Building resilience is really at the core of our mission of ending extreme poverty While resilience thinking is not a new effort USAID has instituted a real commitment to focus on this Concept of resilience using evidence and results from the ground to guide our strategic approach in 2011 we had a bit of a collective wake-up call when the worst drought in 60 years hit the Horn of Africa resulting in 13 million people requiring humanitarian assistance More than a quarter of a million people perished in Somalia alone and half of whom were children under five after the drought USAID pledged to get ahead of these shocks and stresses To work across our relief and development programs To help people to adapt to mitigate to manage The risks that are faced in places where there are going to be recurring disasters So one example of this commitment is our global resilience partnership This is a partnership among the Rockefeller Foundation Sweden and USAID where we have committed over $150 million over five years to program in Against this concept of resilience and using the idea of community led Definition of problems all right in the Horn the Sahel and South and Southeast Asia Another great example is what we are here today to talk about And that is our report and I am told at a point Somewhere during this discussion. We will actually officially announce its release so hold your breath the higher education solutions network is one of the flagship programs of the US global development lab It is dedicated to using science technology and innovation to change our approach By leveraging the power of universities Through HESN's university led partnerships the global development lab seeks to promote greater collaboration between Scientists and researchers and students and faculty and development practitioners to change our approach to development and To address our most challenging development problems the resilience Africa network is One of the HESN labs it is the it is the only HESN lab that is based in Africa and their cohort of 15 Partner Universities is one of our most important pioneers in this effort in large part because of their leadership and track record of engaging deeply with local communities Rans primary objective is to strengthen resilience at the individual household and community level Through innovative technologies and approaches to Development that are going to make a difference to these communities and people To accomplish this they've worked to design and operationalize a scientific dated driven and evidence-based resilience framework for Sub-Saharan Africa The launch of this report is a major step in achieving Rand's goals So with that dr. Bezeo, I would like to officially launch this report In the report Rand really brings together a new set of actors and tools to address the challenges of chronic vulnerability through African-inspired interventions a core principle that comes through as you will as you read the report is the importance of community engagement and I think from from my reading a Really important innovation in in the research structure on resilience is your focus on pathways Towards resilience and away from vulnerabilities Because it is publicly available and developed in close collaboration with local communities the data collected in this report is ready for uptake by future researchers and scholars who can build on the backs of this research To further our objectives here in resilience at the global development lab We look forward to identifying interface interventions and innovations. I've already talked to dr. Bezeo about this is great Let's go do something with it now All right that that execution side of this is really important to bringing this report to life We will continue to work closely with the resilient after-network its partners to develop test and refine these Interventions in the communities that need the most Thank you for your attention and for joining us here today Dr. Bezeo The floor is yours Good afternoon Good afternoon That's better We teach and you must greet your students, but you are not my students You are people that I believe have come here because There's good reason to look what resilience the word resilience is Used in many places Now they use it even in the bus In the train When they are not enough seats people are resilient they stand because they must travel I Must start by thanking the us ID For this great innovation We may be thinking that we are doing innovation, but I think the time they thought about Creating high education solution network. It was a great innovation because they could see Many people are dying and there are no immediate solutions a lot of funds have been spent By many governments and more especially the US government Finding programs all over the world But as we shall later see We never or they never came to sustainable achievements in communities and We keep saying what they kept saying they are supporting communities Communities to make them resilient and they were not resilient So the innovation they had was how do we bring in the academia? The people that think they know and there are so many their faculty and their students How do we tap on their knowledge to help the communities they live with? So the communities we are dealing with are not new communities and The things we are doing are not necessarily new But we are doing them differently and we are taking our universities from the universities to the community With our students and faculty When you look at that It's very typical And you'll find it in many many books where you find Ravaged communities because of floods because of war because of drought And we have seen this year in year out So yes ID came Correct that You have multiple communities in Africa? Later on we believe and I want to say my colleagues who are here some of you may be from Southeast Asia what we have found in Africa may be the same and Without reinventing the wheel you may find that our findings and our actions could change some of the communities in those areas so resilient Africa network is resilient Africa is one word We purposely Said it is one word because we want to cause that resilience in Africa it is one of the eight university involvement labs as Dave said and We are so fortunate and we thank you sID that Uganda or mercury University was chosen to be one of The eight and to be the only one In Africa, but we promised we will bring although we are one will bring together our colleagues from The other African countries and you will see how we bring them We have 16 countries Not that they are the only ones affected But those are the first that we chose that we could work with and the impact the communities next and We are grateful that when we are writing this proposal We had partners That were willing to join us not that those one are listed here We are not there They were there, but these ones were ready with Tulane having suffered To help as professor key will present To help the Katrina the Haiti and then we stanford Having had that experience of the circumvary. So when we brought them in They were handy for us throughout the problems of Africa the rationale for run or The development efforts have saved lives. I said this at the beginning. They have not sufficiently built the resilient Resilience of target communities When there's a flood is a lot of money that goes in when there was a border in West Africa a lot of money has gone in But have we created resilience in West Africa that when they get another border epidemic, they will do better These are some of the questions that we need to answer When there is a catastrophe people running to help but when it is over they run back But we hardly know that it is going to happen again We have our goals and these goals we took time to develop them with our partners We had Jim fishkin on the table He will tell you how I was very adamant on refusing certain things, but now I'm the advocate and We had our other universities that we brought in on board. You've heard of the genocide in Rwanda You have heard of drought and wars in in Somalia Ethiopia you have heard of the DRC so the people we brought together. We're actually hurting and It was the right time and I think Dave with your colleagues I want to thank you that you chose the right time to intervene When you read books and I'm sure when you got the invitation you could have checked on the definition This definition is not anywhere else and as you found it on our website We decided to have our own definition Which would guide us where are we going and why? Resilience as the capacity of the people and the systems to mitigate adapt to recover and run from the shocks and stresses In a manner that reduces vulnerability and increases well-being We are looking at the whole spectrum when the key comes on speak He will you will find that he's talking about the wealth health and other things So we do not want cause resilience on a community Just because they are used to floods so they prepare for floods alone apart from floods What else can they be resilient to? Does it affect the education does it affect family planning? Does it affect what? All these things have been Explored in this run and you'll be happy to read that some of these things are here and if you are here as Development partners you will find that may be why you have been putting your resources you could Shift as Dave says and he told me there. I think this is the time to move and The report that we have here is to show us how do we move? How do we move now we know? At one we believe the solutions to african resilience challenges lie In understanding what makes communities thrive in adversity these communities have not disappeared These things have been happening But they thrive We are so many have died So many have lost their homesteads. They have lost cattle, but how do they live? We start with the community as Dave said our centerpiece is the community Moving the university to the community with the students and faculty It's not enough to write Thesis and so on and you share if it I was in the hotel that I saw I had somebody say I'm going to do my PhD My study report my thesis will be this and I kept thinking so how will it impact the community? Of course, I don't know you Maya had him speaking Want to develop solutions from our innovators universities have so many innovators and one takes the solutions back to the communities ladies and gentlemen If we all stay in our offices and we do not impact any community whether in the US whether in Africa whether in Southeast Asia we are doing nothing all the money will go to West and I want to thank the This government and the people because I've seen many people come to Africa to save lives in the communities this is The piece that is going to be center for the report When you have the report it will be sent and he will have a lot of time talk about it So that's our network Many times I address people and some people do not know where some of the countries are I Know all of you here know where they are, but if you look at that you will see what communities are There It's not enough to that. There's a wall. These are Shabab in Somalia their community is where they have never seen war But they have drought They have no food in Somalia Their communities in DRC that have never had war they have these problems So those are the communities we are looking at and even those which are in war like though northern Uganda where there was war And how do we reintegrate them and make them resilient? When you look in Ghana as later on you hear the director from Ghana Telling you that people moving from the communities to the cities Where they moving there's no water. There's nothing and those are things that we are looking at So we have used different methods and they will be described later on by key and the Jim fish King from Stanford, but we have looked at What are the problems? What are the causes? Why do they not survive and why do those who survive survive and they still hate or resist government policies? Jim will tell you that in Uganda there is a community where there have been landslides and my ambassador is here every time the landslides they say Plant trees plant trees so that you stop these erosion and so on the communities are saying forests in Uganda are owned by the government Now if we plant trees and we are many in a community You give us another land and Then we plant trees here the trees will grow and become a forest Now whose forest is it? So the government is planning take our land the best thing is to resist we don't plant trees and the following year They have floods this has been going on year in year out the politicians go there talk They leave now we have found that we could actually work with these people and see how they can do that better The other method that Jim will talk about is the ability pulling It may be a new method for the audience here for some of you But he's a man is the key man who has done it is done it in China in 20 countries are here He had never done one in Africa. I think he either feared Africa or something, but we have done three in Africa now He will tell you what he has found and wish we could do it for Something we discussed earlier do it before elections for any country to make a difference Translating resilience findings in two innovations our next step after seeing this What is the next step? We want translate these findings in two resilience interventions If we don't would have cheated our people because we have worked with the people we have been with them We know where they are coming from. We know their problems. We know how we can help them So this involves the intervention strategy workshops, which we have done with the communities You'll not be that this man from Stanford goes and lives in the most remote place in in Uganda with the communities To see how do we turn around? What we find there and how can it be helpful for them so that we save I I'm supposed to give you an overview the guys are who are here supposed to speak a lot and Explain at the run we believe that resilience of communities can be tackled through innovations Now there are so many innovations in the Silicon Valley, but we don't want them We want innovations generated by the communities with the students and staff I didn't say generated by staff or faculty they are generated by the communities with the students and faculty So they will be acceptable. They'll be usable. They'll be sustainable We have so far done. We did calls to using the results for different Countries we have had some for East Africa somebody will speak we've had for South Africa And we are now in the in the Ethiopia Gima this What does this tell us? that these ladies They are at the grass roots. They are the communities When did we ever? Ask them what they think about what happens about them Only they have been running away when their floods and so on so we have involved them and we are happy to say that USID this time round. I think the dollars you have given them to you have given to us have gone to the right place The right information gives the right solutions if you look there For people who have been having drought. We have a group that is working on fodder on grass That grows within six days to feed whatever hard that you have So that whether there is drought or not you have grass for your animals. We are looking at communication root IO Last mile communication the last mile means the last person at the end of the mile How do you want him without having these radios and Saying oh, we can use Cell phones we phone cell phones are not useful because they will not be charged If they are charged people are busy, but we have developed we have a group developing Bucket radios you use a bucket that you use at home to work to water actually broadcast These people are not here to talk about it Then the other group we found was when they move because of the displacements. They have diseases like Maria We have no labs. So how do we make diagnosis? We have a group that is working on Saving those communities using to diagnose Maria using their phone Not using any lab or in a prick. So at the phone you own you make your own diagnosis and many others so Some of those things some of those that you see they are not talk to it We have done the challenges which you have seen from my idea. I see the USID we did some challenge calls and we've got very nice applicants We've got 350 applicants and we have supporting some of them with funds Grateful from us ID and they're working on innovations for helping the communities and On that note, I'd like to thank you Dave and your team Thank Jennifer for this great work. This report that you see is just a small volume But the details will be on the website Later on that you can see figures you click on Ghana you see the figures where they coming from and You click on Uganda. You see what is there? I'd like to officially Introduce my deputy vice chancellor who is there if you could stand for recognition professor So we have our university leadership This is not a one-man show. This is not Vazio show This is the whole of Africa we have our director from Ghana Dennis turn for recognition director for South Africa they come we did not bring the other directors, but the They'll be here because we have another meeting soon. We have our ambassador from Uganda representative of the ambassador is here So it's not It's not university alone. We work with the government. We work with the communities and My brother key is here. He's the key man. His name is key KY and you'll be seeing him Thank you very much and thank you for coming. Thank you for responding to the invitation. Thank you very much Before we turn to the kind of getting into some of the details of the findings. We wanted to just know if there were any questions for David or professor And oh yes, please identify yourself and speak wait for the mic Good afternoon. Thank you sir very very dynamic presentation and exciting information You talked about building resilient communities and you reference the recent outbreak in West Africa with regards to Ebola What efforts have you undertaken to support capacity building in Liberia, Sierra Leone and in Guinea those countries that have suffered from the outbreak. I failed to introduce myself I'm Faith Cooper. I'm an independent consultant and actually just returned from Ghana a couple of days ago Looking at Ebola preparedness training for countries post Ebola for those other countries around the region Thank you You know, I would have gone astray if I went to Ebola, but let me tell you Uganda is the only country that is resilient to Ebola now We've had the largest the biggest epidemic before there was Africa Epidemic and the school of public health working with the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister's office Developed a mechanism Whenever Ebola attacks the last Ebola attack we had only one case and When it went to a star Africa Uganda said we must do something Uganda the Minister of Health the school of public health the Prime Minister's office put up a team and the team that was leading the The the working in West Africa was mainly from Uganda later on joined by the African Union and It is still being laid by the people and I will tell you that my school sent at that time 13 people to help bring down Ebola Halfway there we realized that we cannot be there throughout So we formed working with I am We formed a training team because we have the training materials. We have everything so we sent the school of public health sent ten people who have been in the in the In Sierra Leone and worked with key at that time because he's the one who knew the groups that were there so we sent a team of ten people and Two days ago I was talking to them. They have trained over 5000 people health workers how to manage Ebola so we are there and we're not going to leave them alone and We also competed for the grand challenge which came out from SID and our school specifically run Putting a bid to design an isolation Tenth because we believe this isolation sentence available one are not good for the patients Neither are they good for the doctors when they go in So we won the the challenge and I want to thank you SID who are the winner We're told 500 people put in there the applications were the winner. So we are now designing the tent for Ebola isolation in the future And we're given nine months that we should be ready when we are going to produce it. So we are there Thank you offers all kinds of great kind of future possibilities But you're very quick quick. Thank you sir I think that's the key that we have missed in terms of building Capacity and you hit on the building regional capacity because when a disaster happens We can't always depend on our neighbors across the water We have to look at African countries to build that capacity for each other So it was exciting to see that country such as Uganda that has experienced this was there on the ground being headed by Someone like Julius Oketa general Keta who was very instrumental We've worked with him to develop the national pandemic response plan in in Uganda and that was Supported by US Department of Defense. So it's exciting to see that in Africa We're leaning on each other to build that capacity Thank you And I think one of the great things about the network is that it gives an automatic channel for some of those kind of collaborations to happen Look if there's no more Questions on the broad structures of ran. Why don't we turn to our next panel? Which is going to bring out some of the details of the findings and the methodology so David and Professor Baze will thank you so much double vulnerability of food insecurity and HIV and Aspects of vulnerability and capacity in communities affected by those two Stressors and we're going to turn to Dennis Chirua who is with the University of Development Studies in Ghana to talk about Rapid urbanization and food insecurity and some of the vulnerabilities that that come with that And then finally we'll turn to Jim Fishkin of the Center for a Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University And I'll say a little bit about that before they come up first we want to turn to Kee Lu who is director of the Tulane University's Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy He has been really Just helped really guide some of the thinking on on how do you look at at resilience? I think everybody kind of understands intuitively what we mean by resilience, but it's much harder to measure what resilience is and to So to measure whether they're improvements and to really in real terms understand what makes a community more resilient or less Resilient and how you measure that over the time And I think one of the great things that Tulane University has done is to try to develop a framework for doing that and identifying not single dimensions of resilience but how various dimensions of life and and livelihood and within communities come together to create resilience or vulnerability and that has helped I think the Resilient Africa labs think through how that framework can be modified and adapted so that it covers Communities very diverse communities within Africa With one kind of broad framework. So Kee why don't we turn to you to explain a little bit about that and Then we'll turn to some of the labs. Okay. Thank you Jennifer So we've heard from both Dave and and William about the Higher education solutions network, right? Which is really about harnessing the the knowledge to creativity that exists within universities faculty and students to be able to solve development challenges and and the Resilient Africa network is the realization of that vision So that's the theory of change for the RAN which is to be able to strengthen community resilience requires a deep understanding of the local context and that requires local leadership and Tapping into the knowledge that exists within African universities 15 of them Right across of Saharan Africa provides us with that capacity and in a way here when we think about resilience or resilience based programming it Starts with the local context and it requires us to be able to tap into existing capacity so different than perhaps looking at Humanitarian assistance, which is the focus on the most vulnerable and looking at how to measure Vulnerability in a way the resilience agenda starts with the premise that even the most vulnerable communities are capable and We see that in terms of tapping into this network led by McCarr a University in Uganda so Before I get into the framework This year marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and as you know Tulane University is based in New Orleans and I wanted to highlight a study that was carried out by the National Academy of Sciences that we helped Facilitate and it's a study that I used three years ago When the resilient African Network was launched and we brought together all these universities in Uganda To be able to start that dialogue about what is resilience within the African context? What is resilience? How do you define it? How do you prioritize? Whose resilience we want to strengthen? resilience to what? so this study looked at a Community that East New Orleans New Orleans East community As you'll see in this map. It's about 20 minutes from the French Quarter and for years after Hurricane Katrina Researchers were trying to figure out why this certain community New Orleans East seem to be more resilient Than anybody else. They were the first community to actually return post Katrina And they were able to Rebuild their communities They were able to reach out and support the rebuilding efforts of the greater New Orleans community And they did that with all without government assistance. They did this on their own So researchers are trying to figure out. Well, how is it that they did this? so this community New Orleans East is predominantly made up of the Vietnamese refugees who had relocated to this area after the Vietnam War and What they came up with through this qualitative study was perhaps three Explanations in terms of how they did this and three of those elements. I've highlighted here our social identity and memory social capital and Community competence and I'll explain briefly what what what they are is in the sense that These Vietnamese refugees who had resettled in New Orleans East they had this common experience of Dealing with a crisis in terms of the war and they had this common identity of being displaced of the struggles of having to resettle right in the United States, but they also had this Understanding that through these struggles they emerge stronger So in a way that collective identity that collective memory allowed them to look at Hurricane Katrina not through the lens of being vulnerable. They understood that they would be deployed displaced They understood that there would be destruction But having that ability to be able to not see themselves as victims But perhaps to be empowered and understand that that through perseverance that they could emerge out of hurricane Katrina Even stronger than before and that helped them to be able to mobilize and evacuate Before that also allowed them to come together Before everybody else was kind of waiting to see what would happen to come back to to to New Orleans East to rebuild their communities The second element in terms of social capital again comes from that social memory and social identity that common experience in the sense that Having experienced the ability to kind of come together right from from from from the war in terms of Vietnam That social capital allowed them to look at it in terms of if they had to come back They had to work together So the majority of this community were fishermen So they pooled together money to be able to perhaps support two or three fishermen in terms of being able to go back out Those resources we pooled back to be able to support others They also use that money then to be able to support a fund that would bring in social services Schools to be able to attract and support the communities that came back and the third element that community Competence again have to do with the ability to plan together as a community But also to understand that for them to survive and in a way thrive that they couldn't do it on their own So those resources weren't just going to support New Orleans East They actually providing small grants to support other businesses in the surrounding area Understanding that if the French quarter and other areas weren't coming back They were not going to be able to sustain themselves And I bring this out and as I discussed this with our Iran colleagues three years ago I said well, what is it that we traditionally do post disasters and in the context of hurricane Katrina? Look at where the investments were right we elevated homes to be able to deal with potentially another flood We were concerned about Evacuation and an emergency response. So we kind of focused on better preparations and planning evacuation but if these three elements in terms of social social identity social capital community competence enhances the ability of communities to be able to Thrive to be able to be more resilient, right? Do we have the knowledge? Do we have the tools to go into communities to be able to understand? Do we have the resources that are investing in strengthening these elements? So in a way This was the challenge before this resilient Africa network Which is as William noted here that people in these communities are resilient. They are coping and adapting and Can we draw that knowledge in a way here to enhance the investments that donors like USCID and Others are making in terms of reducing risk and vulnerability Can we find right these dimensions of resilience? Can we identify what makes people capable and Design programs and interventions around them to promote the sustainability So when we came together Tulane University Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy building upon our work in Haiti as well as what we were doing in New Orleans Developed a conceptual resilience model, right that starts with a deep understanding of the context and We developed jointly with these 15 university partners methodologies in terms of Better understanding what was happening not only in their communities But also to map out all of those many investments, right that their governments and other donors were making so that we can understand Where the gaps are and perhaps better understand how to make those linkages to make sure that these investments Have the sustainable impact, right of which we're all aspiring to So it starts with that contextual analysis Which then helps us to be able to then identify what makes people capable and Depending on the context depending on what they are trying to make themselves resilient to So in certain instances it may be floods it could be drought it could be conflict and Depending on those stressors, right? People and communities and systems draw on different capabilities. So it requires us to really understand first prioritize What is it that we want to strengthen resilience to and to whose resilience do we want to strengthen and Emerging out of that allows us to start mapping out what makes people capable and Using right those dimensions of resilience those capabilities as William has pointed out. There is a fund available for the RAND to be able to invest in innovations that are driven by this evidence and Throughout this process. We have to evaluate this We have to figure out whether these investments are having the impact. Are they truly strengthening resilient resilience and If they are then that's going to change the context and that requires this again to be able to come up with perhaps different variations in dimensions resilience so very much. This is about an iterative process that brings together Local institutions of higher learning that brings together various stakeholders from government to the private sector to the NGOs So when we came together Right, we needed to start with this common vision within the resilient African network again of what is resilience? And it was very interesting to hear different perspectives from West Africa to East Africa From Samaya right to DRC and as William pointed out we came up with this RAND definition of resilience and I think one of the most critical things here is this element of learning Right, it's it's learning from past experiences in order to inform and to drive investments And I think that's the critical thing. I think that differentiates right bringing together these universities and that's really the I think the value added perhaps of the resilient African network and when they came together They started to then identify again here. Well, what is it that they want to strengthen resilience to and as you'll see here and in the report they started emerging themes in terms of In the DRC they wanted to strengthen resilience to gender-based violence and In West Africa, they wanted to strengthen resilience to rapid population growth and urbanization in southern Africa It was about HIV AIDS and Using that context then allowed them to be able to go into the community and start better understanding right and mapping out those community assets Who plays a leadership role in terms of mobilization in terms of strengthening community resilience to these various themes and therefore What we have been able to complete and what you'll see in this first state of African resilience report is the Qualitative study that the various universities have been carrying out That allowed them to go into the communities through the focus groups through keen for my interviews developing a common tool to be able to code Right, and that was quite incredible here because what you'll see here is the result that yes We may find some general dimensions of resilience from wealth to community capital to social networks But we're starting to better understand wealth in the context of perhaps an urban context within West Africa versus wealth in a rural context and Community networks and social capital are different within the Somalia context Compared to perhaps the Ugandan context and you'll see in the reports in the very detailed qualitative reports That will be released by each of the university partners over the next several months This very detailed deep insight and the data will also be available But you'll see here Right that there are many themes that this resilient African network attempted to be able to deepen the understanding and Through this qualitative methodology What emerged out of there is that we saw nine kind of general dimensions of resilience We did not go into this process to say is it wealth? Is it social capital is it community networks? But in a way here what we saw emerging out of the network as a whole were these general themes But when we drill down deeper right in terms of what it actually meant we see in a way here that these general dimensions of resilience these salient dimensions interact with each other and They also play a different role in terms of the pathway to resilience and therefore the the resilient Africa Network came up with this Framework to be able to organize these dimensions So you'll see in the report you'll hear further from Lake Han and Dennis Specifically about these pathways, but to organize ourselves to be able to better understand what was happening We said well some of these dimensions relate to these underlying causes of vulnerability and Some of these dimensions depending on the context right where these immediate causes and impacts and Some of them were supporting and enabling factors and some of them actually were the outcomes and you'll see in each one of these Resilient themes that there are different pathways And our role at Tulane is is using this common methodology We're able to kind of look at it now and map out and have a better understanding About these various dimensions and how people and communities can become more capable So you'll see here. This is very busy table, but in a way up top What you'll see in the report are these various themes from gender-based violence to HIV AIDS to internally displacement in Somalia and in the white are those general dimensions Right and it's color-coded in the sense that green has to do with the outcomes The yellow has to do with the immediate Causes and effects the orange are the underlying causes Right and the blue are those enabling and support factors So again, it goes back to this framework And what you'll see in the report here is that wealth Across the themes here depending on those stressors manifest itself differently sometimes wealth is an outcome right sometimes it's an immediate effect of when that Flood or that conflict occurs Sometimes it's an underlying cause and what this is doing is that it's allowing the labs to inform the innovators So if flood happens to be something that we want to strengthen resilience to These innovation teams are going to get this problem set. They're going to get the data They're going to get the insight to be able to say in a way if we want to strengthen resilience We have to look at these pathways right and in a way here Think about entry points. Sometimes we might want to develop an innovation That will enhance those supporting and enabling factors Sometimes we want to invest in innovation that addresses those underlying causes of vulnerability Sometimes it may be to promote an outcome on top But I think what we're attempting to do here through the resilient Africa network with our framework is to say that all of this is resilience It's not just intervening when outcomes. It's not just reducing risk and vulnerability but in a way here to finally perhaps fulfill this mandate of sustainable development is having to be able to make sure that all of these elements are being addressed in a systematic way and We hope that the qualitative report Will deepen the understanding perhaps of the community to be able to better understand how to design interventions around this and We're not stopping here because out of this qualitative process when we look at the wealth of Well in a way that many of the different definitions of these dimensions we're now developing indicators and all of the labs in the next phase are going to move into the quantitative phase Which then perhaps will allow us when we think about these pathways is to better understand Perhaps how things move Perhaps if we make an investment With regard to one dimension what and how does that influence another dimension if we make a certain investment in terms of Reducing underlying causes. What does that return on the investment in terms of the outcome? So a lot of these questions? We're still addressing but Thankfully, this is a network that is being supported by USAID over five years And it's going to really allow us to continue to explore But also work towards providing some real evidence in each year we're going to be updating the state of African Resilient Reports and Also to be able to highlight a lot of learning that's coming out. So let me stop there and have One of the lab directors really get at the details in terms of what they were able to learn. Thank you We're going to turn to Lake on IO Yusef who's Dean at the University of Limpopo's Medical University Director of the Southern Africa Development Lab our iLab Just one thing on our two universities represented here Both of these universities and in fact all of the universities in the RAND network Have this is not the first time they engage with universities one of the bases of selection of the universities What that is that they've been working for a very long time very closely with with communities around them So this is not kind of day at Makina coming down into a community beat But working using those connections they've developed over many years since their inception in working with them Lake on if you're settled in Why don't you tell us about the Southern Africa develop Southern Africa lab and what you're looking at what you do? Thank you very much. Why I'm still standing It's about part nine close to my bedtime But I probably would like to start off by introducing The lab which is also that the University of Pretoria and Perhaps to clear the air why I have two universities within one university. I was just looking at it now That's kind of the effect of resilience right you start at one and you move through Started off and a transition from University of Pretoria where the lab is hosted to University of Limpopo Made this a campus of University of Limpopo Historically 40 years ago the medical University of Southern Africa was established to train African doctors in the Southern African region Many of you know the history of South Africa and then it evolving to be in a campus of another University and Two months ago it became back a campus or University on its own called Sifaco, Machatu Health Sciences University but The Resilience African Network house within University of Pretoria As you've all heard it's looking at the theme of poverty and HIV AIDS across three countries in Southern Africa Now the countries were selected based on as you know Most of these universities have had working with communities as leaving labs as part of training medical doctors and health professionals Is that you need to have at least 30% of your training working in the in the communities so many of the communities were selected based on Entry points that have been established before and of course the broader context of Southern Africa and being the well not a great CV but the capital of HIV AIDS in the world With in South Africa in particular Six million people live in the disease We not focusing on the disease as it were on how you get the disease But more importantly you're gonna live with the disease forever So the question is how people coping because it becomes a chronic condition like every other chronic disease So it was interesting to see the nexus of living with current disease and poverty at the same time in the region there were commonalities in Malawi Zimbabwe and in Limpopo province which is in South Africa Zimbabwe the Community we're looking at is Bay Bridge Which is the border town to Limpopo province in South Africa and Malawi We're looking at Chikwaha, which is in the south of Malawi Butter with Mozambique and we're able to also have an understanding of what happens in Mozambique Because we all know the flawed problems in Mozambique and So we had this three countries selected poppies fully Represented about half of the population in the all of southern Africa So it's about in total 84 million people live in these three countries out of the 164 million in the in the region itself So we had a good feeling that whatever we learned from here Could be replicated or could represent what's happening in the region Importantly For me in particular haven't done a lot of work and research It was an opportunity to have a good feel of what the voices of people in a particular Community is like and therefore make a difference in this particular community without having to aggregate them in the bigger numbers of Statistics and that's what ran is doing for Myself and many of the faculties that I involve in our region So when you look at That framework it looks very complex very complicated So I'm gonna try while I'm still awake To take you through the thinking and how of this link up in narratives the full report you would get so the three countries We looked at three rural communities Commonly they all depend on refilled Rainfed more small old in agriculture for their means so as a source of livelihood Drought or ever a mental dimension Therefore was an underlying vulnerability. There's a lot of drought common in these three countries and in particularly Malawi Floods as well Now the context remains You know when we keep asking the question you sometimes want to walk away from the idea of You know, everybody's been talking about HIV and prevention, but it keeps coming back to say if there is flood We could save many of our properties Except that the first thing we'll have to do is to try to get the very sick people out of bed And therefore we lose more property because we are not able to ever quit as quickly as we would have loved to So that's one vulnerability for losing their wealth that they have built up So that's kind of example of how the environment Condition or natural resources of climate variability Actually influences and has the effect So we also have situation where then what happened is that people are not able to complete school You can have flawed and the impact going three months or more And then human capital becomes a problem and of course ability to generate wealth becomes a problem itself on the other hand, we've got support and Enabling factors on the left side of that diagram If you look and if you still awake you can see that far like I cannot see I have an excuse for not being able to see that far But in the top box is the social support dimension Or social capital and a bottom of that on the left would be your governor's institutional factors and Next to it you have health and psychosocial dimension Now the way we interpreted that from the findings Is the fact that the psychosocial dimension buffers the underlying vulnerability By tapping into the social Networks the psychosocial dimension buffers the vulnerability by tapping into the social networks to create or assure and protect wealth For example People are able to come together Over and above this problem of stigma that prevails in the community Because there is what brings them together is this Savings that they make true world to call stock fields So this contribute money monthly and each person takes out money out of it to buy groceries for food and In the same time they're able to use this commit this grouping to help each other and break the stigma They're also able to then tap as a unit with Government for social grant and social assistance and for example some will give Example like we were able to save out of the small social grant and then able to buy stock Together with a stock for a contribution that we took out We're able to start our own business and they were able to get out of vulnerability. So it's not always about poor people Nothing to do. They also able to do things. We also got Sins of entrepreneurship from the youth When people say I don't own livestock. There are a lot of old people in the in the community What I do is to go house to house and collect the livestock and help them to head the Cattles and I get paid for that. So there's some sense of Entrepreneurship that taps into what is in the community as well So we learned a lot from that in terms of what kind of potential interventions can go through So on the other side is social capital, which we say is another buffer So you have your psychosocial linkage to social support and government grant on one side in the short term to buffer against Poverty when the long term on the right side is social capital Because whatever happens in the short term They often return back to depending on the natural resources because they don't have a Any education to take or skills to take up new income generation So in order to diversify income the human capital itself becomes the long-term social buffer That can prevent the loop or the big jump right from when you're wealthy in the presence of adversity to back being dependent on Farming and the same time you can also jump you straight from having solely depend on farming and the vulnerability Back to wealth. So the long-term sustainability is around social capital and of course as impact course and effect you have Problems of security Obviously without human capital people then turn to crime. They eventually get to Seek or get it to do social Commercial sex as in Zimbabwe as a vulnerability Now while this framework is common for all the three countries, there are differences as well For example in Zimbabwe another vulnerability is the fact that is a border town It is captured under the infrastructural dimension Interestingly, you never always think about the loop What the community explains is the fact that when there's corruption because of the butter town there's a build-up of trucks into this into the town and Therefore they spend much longer than usual and of course they keep themselves busy At the same time all the male-headed also all the males in the heads of the household I've all migrated to South Africa for jobs in the short term. So the women keep the truck drivers busy and that continues the loop of poverty HIV AIDS and Goes round so always how do you break the loop because this is a very complex and intricate links and some of them that I started engaging in what the Entrepreneurship looking at local Mopani worms they are worms that are grown locally that they actually as a form of food security as well but have potential to become skilled and have income generation potentials so to just kind of cap some of the Findings I'll read some quotes Because we looked at focus group discussions with people living with HIV AIDS women men and Youth so we selectively or particularly looked at this group and then we looked at Social workers looking at the system itself how the system is coping school teachers and doctors So all of this together we were able to understand better. What was going on? We had The thinking that HIV AIDS was the biggest problem, but when we went into communities There was a different perspective from the youth Different from that of adults the youth didn't think that was a problem They thought an employment was the biggest problem They had us told HIV was the problem And that's also one of the things that we learned that going to this community. We may not have assumptions The youth says unemployment is a matter for many people not being able to complete their studies so that they can Be hired for a particular job. So most of them qualify for work of unemployed people So they had an understanding of work for unemployed people and that was very interesting work for an employed people is What that doesn't have good handings is very short-lived Now it's oftentimes people can those people has been employed But for the people themselves, it is not sustainable livelihood. So that's work for an employed people Even they have educated young people do not get jobs ends We see too much HIV and AIDS because they are stressed and sex is the only hobby they leave with that's elderly people That's what they are an opinion. The first was the youth another youth unemployment also influence young people not to go to university to study because they would see That there she is look at her. She went to school for four years now. She has not found work So what am I going to do at school? So there is a loop To say they are no role models who have gone to school have jobs. So what's the point going to school? So this is a very complex and that's why you see it It's not easy to show on a two-dimension paper But we have tried to put this narrative in the full report and I'll be available to take any questions If you have thank you very much I always think of that model is kind of Trying to ratchet the loop up. So it comes back to the status quo, but how do you ratchet it up a little bit each time to get to? Better outcomes. Why don't we turn now to Dennis Chirua? From the University of Development Studies in Ghana Yeah, good afternoon and let me say Thank you to CSIS for the opportunity To be part of this lunch Since From Brazil's presentation, we have had several other Remarks bordering on what universities are supposed to do In terms of research and teaching and How universities research work and what they teach? Relates or connects with communities For quite a while since the 70s the Association of African universities has complained has lamented over The extent to which Africa higher educational institutions are disconnected from the aspirations of rural communities In my own native Ghana in the 80s they had There were debates as to whether the existing tertiary Educational institutions had programs that are responsive to the aspirations of rural populations That is precisely The concern that gave birth to the University for Development Studies, which I am part of and which happens to be the host of the West African resilience innovation lab I will want to start off Giving you a peep into What we did in West Africa and in Ghana in particular by looking at The people that we engage so if we can't have my presentation on board Okay Yeah, so we we went in three different locations in Ghana the coastal belt Went in the middle part of Ghana in tamale and then the northern tip of Ghana and of Rongo Kasunankana Municipal and in all we went in nine communities and conducted 25 focus group discussions and 18 key informant interviews We've had a lot This afternoon listening to submissions. I'm just going to keep the the the write up and go straight to this interactive Framework that seeks to present What we found in one of our steady districts a shy man in coastal Ghana as key explained in his That's Explanation of the framework What we found in a shy man to be the underlying courses of vulnerability We're basically in the area of security infrastructure and wealth wealth Looked at in terms of how people's livelihoods were impacted or are impacted by virtue of their migration to the Airborne Center and Struggling to egg a living and the infrastructure Both social and economic that is supposed to support people to egg a living and the lack of it there of Courses is an underlying cause also because people have been dislocated from their Social roots and now are living in an urban setting where the comfort and luxury of Family relations are not there It because they allow to come insecure in terms of young girls being exposed to prostitution and in terms of people being confronted with the problem of arm robbery and stealing the intermediate courses basically to Around the center around governance and social social psychosocial issues and the the Outcomes are in the form of low social capital people are not educated people don't have skills to be able to get jobs and they are unemployed and That's an associated health Dimension that has to do with hygiene issues as a result of the urbanization challenges Sanitation and issues of portable water and The enabling factors Has to do with natural resources and then there's the lack of social capital that I talked about So basically I Just decided to focus on one area, but we have done three studies that are contained in the report I would I would like to halt here Once there's an opportunity for questioning and once we pull up access to the reports if there are questions on the area They can share that thank you very much Thank You Dennis, and I think you'll find in the reports how and something that key mentioned how one dimension like health or human capital can translate very differently in a Ghanaian urban settlement Versus a South African border town for example, and I think that's one of the really interesting Parts of the of the report and the country reports What we're gonna do now is turn to James Fishkin who's professor of communication at Stanford University and director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford As we've said community consultation is kind of at the center of the RAND network But actually consulting communities is not necessarily a straightforward in that You know who speaks for the who speaks for the community. How what does a community perspective mean? What community are you talking about? Polling doesn't do it straight polling or even door to door question and answers doesn't quite get at it and I think Jim is gonna talk about the process that he developed deliberative polling which overcomes some of the Drawbacks to kind of traditional a gauging of opinion Jim, why don't you why don't you start out and we'll turn to a question and answer following your presentation Great, and this is on what thank you so much. Oh, let me how do I advance the slides? What I'm pushing Here Okay, so Let me describe As as Jennifer said, I've got a lot of slides a lot of details We've done three projects now in Africa, and I'm very happy and Privileged to be part of this RAND network very grateful to USA ID for supporting this work because I've been doing this kind of work and We've done it in 21 countries about 70 times But I've always said we could do it in Africa and people were skeptical for reasons up and it worked Perfectly nearly perfectly and this is what I want to share with you. What is the problem? So let me summarize a little bit and then I will go through whatever details for whatever time Jennifer gives me To discuss the little overtime so brief is better. Well, I'm just starting so I can't be overtime yet so the The the problem the simple problem is how you consult the public Of course, you might say if you want to consult the public just ask him But if you add just ask him let's say to show up at a meeting you'll get the people who feel very strongly you'll get an unrepresentative sample of the public and If you don't have any structure to the meeting you may just get the people who feel really strongly dominating everybody else and If you do polls polls are a good way to consult the public in a representative way But not in a thoughtful way because most people most of the time do not are not Motivated to become seriously informed about public policy issues. There's the famous phrase of Anthony Downs back in 1957 Individual voters and citizens are rationally ignorant. They have one vote in thousands tens of thousands or millions Why should they spend their time becoming informed? But we would like citizens to become informed about their communities and their societies so that their public opinion is meaningful If you do focus groups, they're too small to be representative focus groups typically are eight or ten people their quota samples. They also Try to reach consensus which has some other issues focus groups are meant to be suggestive That's what Robert Merton meant when he invented the focus group Which you can see described in a book. He wrote Robert Merton in Columbia years ago called the focused interview. They're meant to be suggestive They're not meant to be representative So the work we do is built on top of all the work that was described so far That is the focus groups the key informant interviews the voices from the public and by the way this work is Situated I think that there's been a long development in a long Increasing emphasis in development work to be inclusive to hear the voice of the people as David said at the very beginning but how do you do it and It began with stakeholder advisory groups a mistake holder groups But they don't speak for the people they speak on behalf of the people then there's Participatory work like the participatory budgeting which is spread around the world But the but those are self-selected so they're unrepresentative The question is whether you can do the kind of thing which I characterize and others characterize as deliberative democracy Which is representative and thoughtful at the same time gets over this dilemma that the focus groups and the public meetings Those people may be informed, but they're not representative the polls may be representative, but they're not informed How do you get both? Well, it's a very simple idea so built upon on the top of all the hard work about the themes in each of the labs We have in two of the labs taken those themes convened the kind of stakeholder advisory group that are expert on the policies that might be ripe for Action to address the environmental variability to address the problems of to rapid urbanization The environmental variability was in Uganda the to rapid urbanization was in Ghana policy proposals that might be ripe for decision Then we the advisory group develops an agenda briefing materials arguments for and against that the people need to be informed about to begin a discussion not to end it to begin it and Then because the populations are not literate as in other deliberative polls There's a lot of illiteracy in them the low level of literacy. We developed video versions of the briefing materials to present We convened the samples they deliberated for two days Under good could the basic idea is you take a representative sample and you engage it in serious Deliberation deliberation means weighing the competing arguments becoming more informed considering all the pros and cons and In small group discussions they that are moderated They identify key questions that they want to ask those questions are directed at competing panels of experts Who answer from different perspectives who answer the question? They don't give speeches They only answer the questions that people urgently want to know in order to make a decision Then they take the same questionnaire that they there's a questionnaire on first contact and then a questionnaire at the end of The process and we see the changes of opinion and we usually get lots of statistically significant changes We also tape the small groups so that we have all the qualitative richness of focus groups But all the small groups added up are a representative sample So then we can code those small group discussions and we can see the reasoning and the factors behind the opinion changes and if we have room in the questionnaire for the right Explanatory variables we can also do regressions to explain the levers of opinion change so We did all of this. Let me move through my slides we did with with McCara University and Uganda and UDS in So we've done this around the world about 70 times in 21 countries So let me let me briefly describe what we did in Uganda and briefly describe what we did in Ghana in Uganda we worked in the Mount Elgon region Which is subject to? environmental disasters in Badoota in the mountainous areas there are rock slides and In the low land of Boodalajah there are floods these periodically wipe out parts of the population and They pose a real challenge because the people come back. Why do the people come back because? it's very fertile land and It's a highly populated area as I recall the Average population density in Uganda is 175 persons per square kilometer the average population density in this region is 950 persons per square kilometer. These are households with many wives many many children the The women mostly did not receive much education There are real challenges So we included population pressure as one of the themes, but we also included relocation and Land management William mentioned the problem of land management in terms of people not wanting to build trees because they thought they would lose their land That's not true, but that's the way the public understood it the So the first thing is to get a good sample and here the results were really rather incredible because given The the gold standard method for getting a random sample is to do random selection of households and then Random selection in the household of adults and that's a good way of getting a random sample When I did the first deliberative poll in the United States with the National Opinion Research Center the University of Chicago We did that in the United States with PBS It cost a fortune But it worked great. We did it in Uganda in a cost-effective way with the Energetic graduate students at McCarrie University and research assistants and look at this in Bidota there were 210 initial interviews only 11 people refused to take the initial questionnaire of those 210 201 completed the two days of deliberation Similarly in Budalaya 232 initial interviews only 11 refusals 217 completed the two days of deliberation So it by by the standards of public opinion polling Deliberative polling is built on top of conventional public opinion polling. This is incredible. I tell this to my survey research colleagues They say what planet is this from so in other words? We are getting really good samples and then what happened well Well, that's a small group but in in Bidota They didn't have a place where the people could meet in small groups Usually we do this on a university campus or in a hotel where we have Plenary sessions where the two or three hundred people meet together to post questions and then small group discussions Where they deliberate for our we had to get tense for the small group discussions And by the way, there were observers we always have observers But here are a lot of the observers and I wanted observer badges to put on them where sheep and goats They were walking through the and they were very well behaved. They didn't interfere with the discussion unlike some of the human observers And that's the group gathered together. Actually, that's a photo from my iPhone. I want to tell McCary I want some better photos than the ones I capable of taking but we got lots of That's a simple I can't go through raising funds to support the work of the local disaster management committees was a big change Well, what why is that the last time they had a disaster? It took eight days for any response Why did it take eight days because the central government controls the disaster controls the disaster management the local committees are The the communities are organized, but they don't have any funds It came out in the what we had we revealed the results in Kampala and in Mount L and in the Mount Elgon region and the the It was remarked that the it took six days for McCary's super grass to grow to to Defeat cattle as William said, but it took eight days for the disaster management committee to respond. So they wanted they wanted these They wanted to make them real committees so the community could involve Support the idea that families should consider their resources and planning the size of their families I listen to a man. I'm listening to one of the small groups where this man said that he had 18 children 14 boys and four girls He had to divide his land among the 14 boys To prepare for the next generation and he now thinks family planning would be a good idea So so we get we get oh we get we see we have quotations from the small groups You can understand qualitatively and qualitatively in Buttoligia You know the experts said well there should be an early warning system for the floods We'll use text messaging. No the text messaging went down people said the cell phone systems unreliable See it's hard to get to be sure of electricity. There could be a flood. I might never hear the warning. We want sirens There's sirens for the early warning system will hear the sirens and notice the change from Rezoning high-risk areas for no settlement before deliberation only 46% supported that after it it was 20 points higher They were willing to buy into Rezoning for no settlement in the risky areas and look at the increase in support for government enforcing the minimum age of marriage Let me say a couple things about the Oh the health center too is a really interesting So an idea of the kind of trade-off that we were able to discuss Because we convened with these results to release these results we convened Both in Mount Elgon. I went out there with the McCary team and we talked to the district leaders in Bouddhuda and Bouddhala each district has about 200,000 people and then we talked to then we had a national meeting with the Prime Minister's disaster management committee the commissioner in charge of disaster management all kinds of important officials and by the way For the national meeting the district leaders were so excited about the results that they drove the five hours all the way in To Camp Polat to come to the other meeting in order to say how strongly they felt about implementing the results but just to give you an idea of the kinds of trade-offs for both education and health care the district level officials had been in the process of Centralizing because the idea was the schools aren't very good But we come consolidate the schools. We will build bigger and better schools But of course people have to travel farther and in the case of the health cares They were closing down the so-called health center twos the very local health center in order to build bigger and better health care clinics now in Family planning we discovered that one of the main reasons the women did not want to engage in family planning is they had a number of ideas about what could go wrong and If they have to travel two hours to get to a health care clinic They they didn't feel comfortable engaging a clinic. They wouldn't have the medical care support So the very fact that the health center twos were closing was a disincentive for family planning and the fact that and the girls the young girls are not getting any elementary school education because If they have to travel too far Then there's fear the parents fear that they're going to be raped While they're going to school so one of the ideas that got a lot of support was very small Classes for elementary schools in the villages and people debated well Could these be staffed etc. But there was big support at the end for one room school houses in the villages So that the girls could get some education as well as the boys so They district leaders When we presented these results they said for both districts, they said well We have been thinking of we have been moving to consolidate the health center and to consolidate the schools But now that we hear we understand the disparate impact on the women and the girls of Consolidating the health centers and consolidating the schools. We think we should start decentralizing again So look the the district leaders were making a perfectly reasonable trade-off It was a perfectly reasonable thing for expert opinion to conclude that we could have bigger and better schools bigger and better Health care centers, but they needed to listen to the voice of the people to understand the impact the real impact on that result so All of our results are about the public considering the trade-offs from their perspective when they're informed but a representative sample doing that and We think that that we will get implementation of these results because all these stakeholders bought into the agenda beforehand The agenda was based on all the other work before but then they bought in these are policy choices that were ripe for decision well now we listen to the people and hopefully we will get Decisions and I think that that the commissioner and the the gentlemen from the prime minister's office They said this gives us a shopping list of things that need to be done because the problems in Badooda and Budalegia have been long-standing, let me turn to Ghana and In Ghana we had 208 participants out of 243 and by the way only two people refused to take the initial interview so in terms of a sample It's demonstrably, you know, it's an excellent sample And there were 39 policy proposals 29 changed significantly. You can't read all that, but let me give you an example so if you look at a map of Tamalee tamalee has grown from a couple hundred thousand four hundred and fifty five hundred thousand depending on the estimate of The population and and the problem in tamalee. This is in the northern part of Ghana, which is the poorer part of Ghana is Too rapid urbanization. There's a lot and our themes where water sanitation health livelihood and food security and These are urgent problems so if you look at a map of gannas to see where the Vegetable gardens are and you juxtapose that as we did in our briefing document and the video With the map of where the public latrines are They're the same places Because that's where people are getting their water to grow vegetables. There's an urgent lack of water so There was a big in there was a big there was a significant increase in support for banning the use of Untreated wastewater for growing vegetables now That's an indication of a real trade-off because that involves sacrifice Because people have to have to get food somehow There was also a big increase in support for something which to show you the convening power of this the way this works When we had the advisory group, we had the presiding member of the municipal assembly That's the local government. We had NGOs red cross all kinds of of experts many very Excellent experts from the University of Development Studies UDS thinking about the policy options So we're talking about the lack of clean water lack of drinkable water One of the experts said Well, there should be rainwater harvesting Because there's a there's a lot of rain in certain periods and then there's no water at all And in the schools as we showed in the video when there's no water that the teachers send the children out for schools But they they find polluted water so there ought to be rainwater harvesting So the at that point in the advisory group the presiding member hadn't said anything at all up to that time And then he intervened and he said if the public wants the those tanks for rainwater harvesting for the schools I will make the I promise you I will make the municipal assembly pay for those tanks Well, the public really wanted those tanks for rainwater harvesting and I'm planning with Dennis who was a fantastic Partner in this to go back to to tamale for a meeting with the whole advisory group to release the results and I'm going to say to him Now can we get those tanks and there's a whole bunch of other other such results So I should say that when we evaluate these results you you see the the the people I Can't you probably can't even read. Oh my goodness. They're hard to read. I'm sorry but there there are there are evaluations and the the of the of every aspect and It came out as well as in any of the developed countries where we have done this and people have said You know market hand Humphreys wrote that article about how you couldn't have deliberative democracy in Africa because the moderators would just tell the people what to decide Not in our case we have evidence to that effect or that or that the people Earlier when I tried to do this People said well deliberative democracy is for highly educated populations. No The people in these populations these communities They can deliberate as well as anybody about the issues affecting their communities And you just have to empower them by doing the staff work on the issues and making the information available and making the competing Experts available and through discussion and random sampling you can convene a Microcosm of the population and they can chart the path to To informed buy-in for the policies. It's a path to responsible evidence-based Advocacy for so we so basically you see when we convene the advisory group We convene the decision-makers with a random sample of the people So we don't have this problem of self-selected groups that behave like angry voices We don't have this problem of polls that are uninformed rather We can get results that and I think in these three cases in in Africa The results will actually be Implemented and then it can set an example for other places. Okay. I've run out of time. So thank you Thanks, Jim. I tell you at the first session of the ran when he gave that Presentation and William sat back and said and a lot of people in the audience said no no And it's really great to hear that it that it has worked so well And it also it just raises all kinds of possibilities for that process in In a whole lot of different settings within Africa when community consultation is needed Listen, we're almost at time and I've been a bad moderate in that way but let's see if there's any questions we can take a couple and Then turn back to the panel and if you do have to leave please do but if you can stick around that's great Yes, and wait for the mic. It's coming and identify yourself Hi, I'm Julie Howard. I'm an independent consultant that formerly with USAID Thank you very very much for what's been a very fascinating afternoon. I have so many questions But let me just ask one which is probably totally unfair at this stage But you know putting on my former hat me at USAID, you know What what's already emerging from your work in what USAID ought to consider doing differently to instill? Resilience instead of just addressing an immediate Need I in a number of the presentations. I thought you know, I heard echoes of things I thought they were already being done right so the vulnerability assessments I see lots of NGO partners in a room who can speak to that so it'd be useful I think to to in your work probably you're already doing this contrast What's happening now and sort of tease out what's different? You know in in in this approach and what would be your recommendations to agencies like USAID and UN agencies, etc. Thanks Thanks, Julie Yes at the same table Thank You Mena Demise with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Professor fish and thank you for laying out the research design. That's very helpful My question has to do with what may happen in the next iteration of this analysis and and to the extent to which civil society organizations Influence the shaping of sort of local public opinion and then the second part of that is The return of the African diaspora and the extent to which they've been involved in In shaping, you know civil society and also, you know public perception of participation and governance So if any of you on the panel can speak to that in the far back nothing over here Take America at Georgetown University Business School Professor fishkin on on your last set of Items there all of those are business opportunities if framed, right? entrepreneurial opportunities to address water and waste disposal and so on Are you engaging the business schools in Africa? I've been working with business schools in Africa. They are the key I Taught at Stanford Business School many years ago. So go Cardinal and That's the question. What's the role of the business schools in all of this? Okay, we're gonna take them off. Okay. Yes then and then Thank you so much for your presentation. My name is Angelica Spina and I'm a technical advisor for resilience in an NGO called Lutheran War Relief And my question is for Mr. Lou in regards to a framework And one of the things that we know about resilience is that it takes place different at the community at the household and at the Individual level so I was wondering in the framework that you develop How do you deal with the tensions and the feedbacks among the different levels and most importantly? How are you accounting for the linkages between gender and resilience? Thank you. Thank you Still nothing over here. Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Rosemary Seguro. I'm the president of an organization called hope for tomorrow We focus on violence and conflicts resolution. Thank you so much for your presentation and in your presentation looking at Africa as a Woman born and raised in Africa. Where are the women on table? You want us to have a women lab too. So You looking at communities Communities, how do you engage with civil society African civil society organizations here and also based in Africa? I work with the university from where I come from in Kenya We are doing almost the same thing, but we've never heard of what you are talking today So how do you engage at the universities other organizations like ours just like a core people don't know about it So we want to know how do we work together for this to go to the community? Just don't wait to get the information from the community and then you get credit for it and then the report comes. Thank you Okay, do we have one more anymore? I'm there will take a bunch together, but I'm okay. We're gonna take one from over here He someone and then we'll go from what I've heard first of all is very impressive It seems to be mostly focused on adaptive resilience, and I'm wondering if you've considered transformational resilience in the context of Global change including climb but not limited to climate change So you have this massive urbanization and 70% of the children are born into the edge cities For example, they have no infrastructure and that continues to be fed because the population is rising so quickly that means that the carrying capacity is actually dropping and in some senses many of these areas have no capacity very, you know Imploding capacity to deal with the challenges of communities. So I'm wondering beyond adaptive resilience Are you also looking at the issue of transformational resilience and looking at these fundamental very large shifts in the Background of the communities. Thank you Hello, like my son from the African Center for Strategic Studies at the end you national defense university I would like to know if you if you you if you did use this very interesting method to with the security issues for example for the for example for Mali after the terrorist attacks, did you use this method about security issues or just for natural Disaster or or Epidemi or I don't know just That's my question. Thank you that the polling And all the run network because it's very interesting Well, the DRC is focused on conflict and aftermath of conflict But they have not yet done the deliberative polling aspect just to answer that so far, but key. Why don't you? Talk about kind of what is emerging that USAID might might use now. What's different sure you don't mind I Think when we started this and part of the Higher education solutions network, which is to bring in different actors and I was recently in Nairobi Last week where one of our partners has been a during University in Somalia and again, I came out of USAID I used to be part of the office for disaster assistance in a way here when we see these these crises whether Syria or Somalia where Traditional humanitarian actors the international NGOs are operating by remote operation We're starting to see now through the resilient African network of being able to really identify local partners and Ben and your university Has has carried out the study that's looking at how to strengthen resilience to chronic internal displacement And that is now informing the government that is emerging There's now request about how to be able to kind of build as momentum So I think there are some differences that we see coming out of this in the sense that it's it's offering now Perhaps new tools and new partners And in a way perhaps to make these investments that builds local Capacity truly and and provides these local leaders to have a voice So not necessarily perhaps where there's new Programs that are emerging but who are really going to be able to implement those programs and to be able to build that capacity So I do think that there's insight There's also the the emerging actors here that we haven't traditionally gone to to be able to to help carry out this work there's a question about perhaps looking at resilience at a systems level and and Absolutely the framework that we have developed and constantly are working with that the various labs is to look at Resilience at a systems level So one of the challenges here is is you know, how do you measure resilience and and looking at those indicators and You know more often than not we're looking at measuring at a household level Where in fact some of the real challenges to resilience in terms of governance And and the environment are at a systems level, but if you look at the framework here and how we're informing the interventions There are different levels here in terms of what we're saying that that there are entry points so one of the themes in Rwanda was resilience to floods and One of the top line outcomes had to do with psychosocial impact So in a way here more floods were occurring. It was Ultimately resulting in a negative outcome in terms of psychosocial Well, one can look at it and say well, what's our entry point? Do we bring in counselors to be able to to to mitigate the negative psychosocial impact or do we perhaps look at some of those? Immediate impacts in terms of effects in terms of perhaps strengthening the environment or strengthening infrastructure So we are attempting to be able to provide a more systems level analysis That still captures different entry points and we're not promoting one versus another but it really does Get the innovators to really think about if you have 50,000 You have a hundred thousand dollars if you have a million dollars, right? Where will you have the most impact? So that you're not attempting to always look at root causes and you're not always trying to address outcomes So that I think that's where this this framework and the ability to be able to work with the local universities And the various labs has really started to see some changes in the way that Interventions solutions are being developed It strikes me that that goes a bit to the last point as well in terms of if I understand Transformative resilience. I mean these labs are looking at entry points where they and their teams of multidisciplinary Faculty staff and community can have an impact now There are big structural Transformations that show up in those charts and the enabling environment that are going to take Kind of a whole different level of intervention to change if I understood that question correctly That would be for a government kind of a much Much more kind of profound Government-led probably intervention to change in a way Yeah, and some of you know, this is the first of hopefully many Quality reports and the quantitative report and the analysis that will come out will hopefully provide deeper insight But yes, absolutely. I think we're targeting change at various levels So at a project level, there's resources within the ran Right to support these teams to develop interventions Also to hire a level where we're hopefully informing the policy makers to Rethink to reallocate resources in a way that's more impactful and through this process of bringing in these Institutions where you have faculty and students who are grappling with the development challenges We're we're yes, we're looking at adaptive capacity But we're also looking at here in terms of what might be some of those challenges in terms of being able to scale up Some of these transformational activities So it's one thing to come up with a good idea But also to really find out what are those real inherent structural challenges to be able to scale up And I think that that's where the end-to-end process here where over time We will be able to come up with perhaps more evidence, but right now. Yes, I agree that the initial Assessment here is addressing kind of more adaptive capacity, but we're hoping to move into that higher level systems change Lincoln has a Comment and then we're going to turn to Jim for the questions directed at him. I Think it's important to hide here One thing that is missing in this process that has been described is what we followed Methodologically in terms of looking at scaling in potential interventions and innovations to respond to some of the findings With the help of the change lab within Stanford We've been able to develop a methodology for human centered Innovations or interventions that could go to scale So in particular we've requested as you see from a previous slide for applications For any intervention that could be transformative and that's the criteria for those who apply to provide interventions to respond to the challenges that have been identified we went through a series of workshops to define pathways to innovations that could be transformative so that's actually already in the in the system and To respond to the involvement of NGOs We particularly from the beginning of the project through the project and continued Ensure that we have community liaison people We'll have direct connection with communities and live in the communities and therefore able to provide the continuous feedback of the information the information being collected and So they're often part of the information already They already know this information we're presenting in their own language and Interpretation and what to do and the NGOs are actually part of those who are also eligible to provide Up to apply to the our labs for intervention that can be skilled to work with faculties and students So we are working with NGOs as well in terms of intervention or innovations that could respond to some of the challenges identified Great. Thanks, Lacan. Jim Well, I just wanted to add in response to the questions There are no so far as I know there are no business schools that are part of the ran network that's something that William might consider at some point if he wants but but there there certainly as you say our business opportunities and Of course some of them may be facilitated by the Competition and startup process that that that key referred to but just to give you an example in the Ghana project There was a just one of the items on the agenda was waste to energy, you know there are various methods to make energy out of waste and so that was on the agenda and It was strongly supported and The network of advisors Informed us that there are actually companies interested in exploring Waste to energy if there's support from the municipal assembly. Well, the municipal assembly Reacts to the support of the people there might be a waste to energy opportunity In tamalee and as the people in tamalee said we have a lot of waste and we didn't realize it was a resource But it can be turned into a resource and they need electricity obviously so these these are the kinds of things that can emerge The projects always involve civil society in the sense of but it's the stakeholder advisory group constituted in the area that is Relevant and available to do quite a lot of work in the preparations, but I think the the the the magic For implementing these results is the combination of the stakeholder advisory group and the local government and the People convened together to consider what can be done The questions in the deliberative polls are are not abstract questions. They're questions What can be done about these problems if you think these problems are urgent? What are the trade-offs? What are the challenges what will work? What won't work why from the standpoint of the people and then hopefully some of these things will be implemented. Thank you Okay Look, we are at time and just a little bit over First of all, I really want to thank our panel for kind of conveying the multiple dimensions of this network