A section of the RAN Resilience Team comprising of Dr. Roy William Mayega, Dr. Harriet Namata and Grace Bua Mongo participated in the TOPS/FSN Network East and Southern Africa Regional Knowledge Sharing Meeting held September 20-22 2016 at Speke Resort Munyonyo, Kampala Uganda.
While at the meeting, Dr. Roy William Mayega, RAN Deputy Chief of Party was invited by Tim Frankenberger, President TANGO International to present RAN’s Resilience work during the session on “Measuring Resilience: Recent work on Measuring Pastoral Livelihood Diversification and Resilience in Africa’’ . The session was chaired by Tim Frankenberger himself and co-presenters were; Dr. Roy Mayega, the RAN Deputy Chief of Party and Mark Langworthy, Vice President TANGO International. In this session Frankenberger presented the latest findings from a pastoral diversification conference held in Addis Ababa, September 2016 while Langworthy presented empirical findings on livelihood diversification from TANGO International’s recent work in Somalia. Dr. Mayega presented on RAN’s recent work measuring pastoral livelihoods diversification and resilience in Africa: A perspective from ResilientAfrica Network (RAN). In his presentation, he made reference to the case study of Ethiopia and how the process of translating qualitative dimensions into quantitative indicators, conducting surveys and testing relationships was implemented. He delved in-depth into the RAN methodology of using Principle Components Analysis (PCA) to identify underlying components that could best represent the resilience dimension and Structural equation modelling to assess correlational linkages between dimensions (Interventional Pathways). The PCA and the Structural equation modelling was impressive to many of the resilience experts so much so that one of the first tangible outputs among many was that the USAID FFP Senior Advisor, Moffart Ngugi requested for a special meeting with the RAN Resilience Team to learn more about how to translate Resilience research and data into evidence based resilience programming. This meeting was held on Tuesday September 28, 2016 at the RAN Office premises. During this meeting too, the team agreed on implementing several activities moving forward for the benefit of other development partners too and growth of RAN.
TANGO International is a network of consultants from around the world. It is a global leader in food security, livelihoods and resilience which provides technical assistance in assessment, design, monitoring and evaluation for development and recovery programs. They are a preferred partner for government and United Nations agencies, international non-governmental organizations, local consultants and community organizations.
It is important to note that these were yet another set of rich knowledge generation and sharing meetings as they enabled participants to share experiences, challenges experienced during community consultations/field work and use these as a learning platform to benefit other practitioners in the same field. The RAN team remains forever indebted to the TOPS/FSNN team for the opportunity to participate in this engagement.