Timestamp, 39:14

Q: In terms of developing the next generation of individuals who tackle these questions, what are some of the skills that you think are important for students to come out of a university having?

Great question. I've definitely thought a lot about this because we do not have the pipeline we need right now. Right now, what we're getting is students, typically graduating from master's programs, many of them not coming in equipped with very tangible skills. I think one recommendation is to think about the practical skills that make students marketable instantly.

I had an experience at Tulane University, where I did my master's in public health. I went on to do a PhD later, but that master's in public health degree left me with a set of marketable skills that I could hit the ground running. So I think for the student's sake, think about what tangible skills could get them jobs in international development today.

For the field of international development’s sake, and resilience in particular within it, we've got a real challenge. We either have people graduating from multi-disciplinary programs who don't have a deep enough disciplinary knowledge to help deliver the technical expertise we need or we have people who are deeply technical in a single discipline who don't have the skill set and haven't worked on cross-disciplinary teams.

A lot of what I did when I was setting up work in the Horn [of Africa] initially, then [later] in the Sahel, would facilitate these 40 to 60 USAID staff from different sectors and disciplines. I would find myself having to break down the silos to get people to see the value in multiple sectors contributing to resilience. I sold this in two ways: one, as the evidence is now bearing out, we cannot build resilience through single sector intervention, so we need collective action across sectors to build the set of capacities we call resilience. And every single discipline has a vested interest in building resilience, because the well-being outcomes--whether it's education, health, food security--is dependent on this set of capacities, and you can't build that alone.

That's been my frame in pitching it within a highly siloed international development organization that receives its money that strongly reinforces those silos. So the whole notion of systems thinking is an earmarked word. And, think about it the same way as you're thinking about creating a pipeline of students: how are you producing students that not only have the deep sectoral discipline knowledge that makes them value add to the international development space, but also has the practical operational experience of working with people from other disciplines, and not only valuing them, but understanding they're essential to the work they're trying to get done.

That's a big part of the unmet need that exists, and a big part of the challenge on our side is we receive people and we have to break down the silos. I remember our work in Sahel, I worked with a group for about four to six months, all different disciplines -- nutritionists, water, agriculture, governance, conflict -- a whole range of different people, was very proud of the vision we laid out together. I thought I had everybody on board. I gave a great presentation to our administrator, Raj Shah; got a full endorsement, several hundred million dollars worth of investment committed to the Sahel. And then a woman who had worked with me for the last four or six months tugged on my shirt and said, “But at the end of the day it's really about water, right?” Because she was a water specialist! And I thought, wow, we have a lot of work to do in generating the next generation of practitioners who come with that mentality of this is beyond a single sector.

Timestamp, 43:50

Q: Can you explain why, if conflict was determined as a major driver in Kenya, was just .01% of the total investment directed to the resilience-building?

I think Kenya's one of these cases where conflict is probably better understood as an exacerbating factor at this point, not as much a driver as it is in a place like Northeastern Nigeria or the Sahel. But it is an important factor and the reason that amount of money--conflict money--was put towards the resilience effort there, is simple: Congress earmarks our money in a way that they give very little to that issue. So when we actually think about how we program to issues around conflict management. Yes, we use that conflict money, but we also have to leverage money from other sectors to help deal with the conflict challenges. One clear example is this initiative Feed the Future. Feed the Future is about agriculture and food security, but we were able to use Feed the Future resources to work with various communities in Northern Kenya on rangeland management, which was one of the major friction points that was causing the conflict. It's important even on the conflict issue to not limit our minds to what can be accomplished through conflict dollars. But to actually think, “Okay we're given money in this very restrictive way by Congress, but how do we get creative here and piece this money together in a way where money is delivering on its own mandate, but together is taking on some of these bigger challenges around the shocks and stresses communities face?”

Great question, we're definitely underfunded in the governance and conflict space and that's why we have to use other dollars to help deliver on those pieces of the puzzle.

Timestamp, 45:35

Q: From your own experience and experience using the Sahel as an example, do you think that the resilience theory has improved livelihoods for most people in the region, and why are the dominant practitioners not focusing enough on bad governance, which appears to be one of the biggest constraints?

It is definitely one of the biggest constraints. It's our second generation programming in Niger and Burkina Faso---it goes under the moniker RISE, Resilience in the Sahel Enhanced, did a huge shift from phase one to focusing much more on governance, both with governance dollars, but attacking every problem whether water security, natural resource management from a governance angle. So I think you're exactly right. Governance is a huge issue there.

The Sahel is one of these areas we started to deal with cyclical climate shock events in 2012-2013. We find ourselves in a much more precarious situation today in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, where it's not just cyclical shock events. In fact, I think that would be the exacerbating factor, it's the driver around the spillover of extremist movements in the Burkina Faso, Niger. We've got an even more complex risk environment than when we began there. What we have done is taken our core resilience work, combined it with work on stabilization, and work through an office of transition initiatives that work specifically on dealing with violent extremism.

So, we have adapted the resilience model, and that's one key thing here, that learning is so important in real time because we are not operating in static risk environments. They are changing, and they are not getting better, and so really understanding how we get ahead of adapting programs as the context changes is critically important.

We're hearing out of the Biden-Harris administration a commitment to diplomacy, defense, and development as three pillars of international engagement, and so I was thrilled when I heard that President Biden said, “God bless our troops, our diplomats, and our development practitioner's.” That is deeply meaningful to people who've been working in the past that didn't see problems of Sahel as a priority.

So I think there's a renewed opportunity to take on these challenges with the seriousness they require in the whole-government approach they require, because that's the approach governments themselves need to take to this. The problems of Sahel are not only a development challenge. They go wildly beyond that, so making sure we approach them that way is critically important.

Timestamp, 48:50

Q: All of the factors that you mentioned as indicators of resilience are highly correlated with individual and household incomes, so as far as measurement of resilience is concerned, what do non-income factors add to the measurement of resilience? Are there examples where the United States has worked on resilience in communities and those communities have those communities been found to be resilient 10 years after the project life cycle?

To answer the second question first. We do have a few examples of those types of evaluations where we go back years after activity has ended and look at the sustainability. We don't do enough of that. We definitely need to do more of that. I would say the resilience work isn't mature enough to do something 10 years later, because we're still operating [in] the same context that we began this work. Seven to eight years ago is when the work really sort of hit the ground. It's an excellent point. It's what we need to be doing because it's not enough to say communities are resilient when we're doing activities there. To say when we built resilience we have to see what happens when we're not there. Is the community more resilient? When something overwhelms the community, is the local government and the institution able to step in and support? And so there is a lot that needs to be done on those types of evaluations. There's very little funding for that. A lot of our funding is tied to a project cycle. But I think it is something that could be an area of potential research that would be suitable for universities to engage in. I know there's some interest in it.

It is true, a lot of the sources of resilience, particularly in that first bucket, are related to income and highly correlated. But, when we look at the independent contribution of some of these things to whether a household's well-being was maintained in a shock event, we're seeing things beyond income matter. Income does matter. But independent of income, so does people's perception about their ability to shape their own future.

A really important one I probably didn't highlight enough is social capital, the ability to lean on other households universally, and that's independent of income level. It helps explain why some households fare better than others, and then there's this whole set of shocks and stresses that go beyond, as I mentioned, beyond a household's capacity to manage on their own, and that's really where we're laser focused on some bigger investments and what are the systems we need to put in place to deal with shocks and stresses that do overwhelm a household's ability to to manage it through their own income.

The other thing, just on the income side, even if they're living out of poverty in a lot of these areas, they're not that far out of poverty. So they're one shock or stress away from sliding back into poverty or, even more extreme, into crisis levels of hunger. And so looking at the income question, there's been a lot of debate between income diversification and specialization in marginal communities, because communities are choosing diversification sometimes even when it's the least opportune in terms of increasing income. So there are some trade-offs there. We used to talk about diversification in relation to sort of a count of livelihoods. There's been some evolution of thinking there, and say, no, we actually need to look at the livelihoods and understand what is the specific risk these livelihoods face, and how are people diversifying their livelihood risk, not just their livelihoods. And so that's been an important evolution as well.

Timestamp, 52:46

Q: What are your thoughts on the relationships between increasing resilience, and violence and conflict?

I think it's incredibly difficult. We're faced with a situation where we know violence and conflict are increasingly drivers. Poverty is being consolidated in fragile states. Do we have the tools to deal with these even more complex risk environments? I don't think we're there yet. We certainly have now operationally succeeded in bringing some of the work on conflict and violent extremism, etc., together with the resilience work in places like Northeastern Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, etc. The work's beginning there.

I'll give an example. There was a development vacuum in Northeastern Nigeria. There had been a huge shift towards focus on oil revenue. Northeastern Nigeria actually used to be the bread basket of Nigeria. What stepped into that vacuum? If you look at the recruitment tools that Boko Haram used, they're giving business loans to young people to recruit them. In Somalia, a country I know very well, $50 and a mobile phone was enough to recruit young people into Al-Shabab, an extremist group there. And it's not because people are ideologically driven. People are making economic choices.

I do think resilience in an approach to livelihoods can have a proactive positive effect in creating opportunities that'll enable young people to make good choices and not leave them with the unenviable bad choice that some are forced to make. There's a prevention element there. But once we're embroiled in conflict, a place like South Sudan, just breaks my heart. I worked in the 1990s during the civil war between the north and the south, and now to be back in another civil war, south on south, is just so disheartening.

And yet when I was out in Juba right before the pandemic hit, there is hope. When I was out in Haiti, February last year. Resilience does this interesting thing of giving people hope, because I worked for years as a vulnerability analyst, where we focused on deficits and what was missing. The concept of resilience...  it sort flipped it on its head. Let's not think about deficits and what's missing. Let's think about assets. Let's think about abilities. Let's think about agency and people's ability to shape their own future. That simple flip has opened our minds into new ways of thinking, beyond sort of technical sectors. When I talk with governments. When I talk with communities. When I talk with our foreign service national staff, there is something there in that concept that people are, for better or worse, glomming onto as an alternative way of thinking about not just business as usual.

One thing I want to highlight that we have learned--that's is critically important when we engage in conflict areas around resilience--is the role of social cohesion. Social cohesion is related to social capital, but it has its unique importance in these areas. This citizen-state relationship--not only state, but sometimes local governance structures--and really a lot of these far-flung places were areas that were never incorporated into the state. Their traditional governance structures have been eroded, they're never replaced with formal governance structures. So really looking at governance as a core underlying area of investment is important.

We don't have the dollars that say “here's governance,” “go do governance.” But what we're doing is taking these broad set of resources saying governance is an underlying factor and must be central to our approach and engaging in these areas. We can't come in with just a bunch of technical solutions, because these aren't technical problems. They're complex social problems that require collective action, and require addressing these fundamental issues around governance.

Timestamp, 57:18

Q: Here are three questions. What's the emphasis on developing new ways of food production versus making the current agro system better or more resilient? What are you guys doing with information communication technologies? Hydro-climate information, weather forecasts, for example, and climate change projections are important for resilience, and how is USAID addressing that?

Let me take the last one question first. We're doing a lot. We've been a little bit hemmed in by our earmarks. We used to get significant resources that would support climate services and the ability to work with governments to build their capacity not only to understand climate forecasting but actually to use them in policy decision making.

I do see that coming back in a big way in the new administration. It won't be hitting, in dollar terms, until maybe two years when this administration is actually putting forward budgets to Congress. It [hydro-climate forecasting] has always been a core part of our climate adaptation work, but in the new frame of resilience and climate adaptation it will continue to be a priority as we look to mainstream in other sectors. But the use of information for decision making is going to be a critical part of our approach to resilience in climate adaptation.

In terms of new ways to develop food versus making current agro systems more resilient, I think we need to be running on both tracks. We actually have a lot of runway in improving the current agro systems in a lot of the countries through sustainable intensification. We've done some really good work in Sahel and West Africa supporting some farmer managed, farmer-assisted natural regeneration that's helping build back ecological resilience and improving yields, etc. There's still a lot of work we can do within the system.

But, absolutely we need those big leaps that happen beyond the current system. There are some platforms for that this year. In particular, the U.N. Food System Summit. One always wonders whether those are largely bureaucratic exercises where people are protecting their interests or whether they can be breakthrough moments in new thinking. 

I think there's a real space for some forward thinking. I think COVID-19 only underscores the need. The impact (of COVID-19) on poverty, on chronic hunger, on crisis levels of hunger are so large that our system completely ill-equipped to deal with it, and it's forcing some new thinking. So, I'm hopeful that there'll be space for making leaps forward in that space and getting beyond some of the incrementalism that we've approached food security and agro-food systems in the past.

Timestamp, 1:00:35

Q: How does your programming approach gender issues and resilience?

I mean, one of the more important things about resilience--there was a slide on this about gender and resilience--is the clear recognition that empowering women is a fundamental source of resilience in many of the places we're working, and so we've gotten some interesting tools we're using. We have a women's empowerment and agriculture index we use to measure changes of empowerment.

So, we all get behind the notion that women's empowerment is a good thing. We all support it independent of its contribution to anything else. But what's really powerful is when we show that empowering women actually is fundamental to the resilience of households, communities, and countries. So that's been the big evidence message framing this year. But I think we have a lot to do in terms of when we actually think about how we're empowering women.

There's been some missteps in the past where, by targeting women with certain activities, we've actually increased the burden of labor on them in ways that that hasn't totally been productive. I think there's a lot of nuance work to do on how we empower women. But I think it's unquestionable at this point in the evidence, in people's minds in international development, that these things like women's empowerment, confidence, agency are fundamental to resilience. I only underscore that because, if I had said that 10 years ago, I might have got a few nods from the heads in the back of the room. But, there's been a real shift in recognition that this is not just about technical sector work. This is taking on the big issues that transcend sectors, whether it is social cohesion or women's empowerment.

So it's an exciting time for the social scientists to also get engaged in this work, and there's been a lot of work done in psychology, in sociology along these lines. Certainly anthropology as well. But bringing that fundamentally to the table in a sector that's largely been dominated by sectoral technical people, there's space for it now. There's more space for it now than there's ever been, and people in other sectors are listening. So I think that's a great question to be asked.