Stakeholder Engagement
Community Engagement projects prioritize participatory processes, capacity building, and local empowerment to ensure development is community-led.
A cornerstone of this area is the ’Co-creating Community Agency for Self-reliance’ project, which used a co-creation process to address youth livelihoods, climate resilience, and education. This project empowered local communities in Uganda and Malawi to lead their own development through a structured five-step co-creation process. In Uganda’s Mayuge and Lamwo districts, the initiative fostered community-school partnerships to improve basic education and supported youth livelihoods through entrepreneurial training and SACCOs (Savings and Credit Cooperatives).
In Malawi’s flood-prone Nsanje district, the process yielded two specific climate-resilient agricultural projects, including intensive maize production using residual moisture. This approach fundamentally shifted community mindsets from dependency to proactive problem-solving, demonstrating the power of locally owned strategies. These projects often focus on the most vulnerable populations, such as indigenous groups and residents of informal settlements, to amplify their voices in the development process. For instance, initiatives have used community radio to enhance disaster awareness and response, and HCD workshops to co-create strategies for ending violence against women and girls. By facilitating two-way information flows and establishing community feedback channels, RAN ensures that response measures, such as those for COVID-19, are informed by community understanding and address emerging needs in real-time.
Complementing this, the HCD and Co-creation to End Violence Against Women and Girls project equipped diverse communities across Uganda, including urban settlements, refugee camps, and fishing villages, with human-centered design skills. The project trained community facilitators to co-develop context-specific solutions, resulting in a portfolio of grassroots innovations such as community alert systems, economic collectives, and school-based programs engaging boys.
The Resilience Measurement, Evidence and Learning Community of Practice (CoP) convened practitioners and researchers to tackle the challenge of measuring resilience. This CoP produced practical frameworks and advanced methodological innovations, fostering south-south learning across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to strengthen the overall field of resilience programming.
