Our fifth and final annual report covers our activities between July 2025 and June 2026. It reports on our multi-disciplinary ‘research-for-action’ activities that aim to guide policies and provide solutions so dryland communities in the Horn of Africa can better manage droughts and other threats to their lives, livelihoods and food security. We do this by:
- Researching and identifying solutions by co-creating evidence on bottlenecks to effective early action, devising and testing solutions that can bring change.
- Informing and influencing practitioners and policymakers by convening inclusive dialogues, fostering partnerships and building consensus on necessary policies and interventions.
- Developing the capacities of dryland stakeholders to manage environmental shocks through the Dryland Futures Academy.
Members of our community of practice play key roles in agenda-setting and prioritizing, in co-delivery of different activities, in reviewing and validating results and outputs and in taking up and applying the most promising changes.
Here, Project Lead Alan Duncan reflects on the Observatory’s approach, evolution and achievements – details of specific projects and outputs are provided in the full report.
Starting points
The Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action was established in 2021 through a generous gift to the University of Edinburgh by Community Jameel. The Observatory was formed by five founding institutions: The University of Edinburgh, the International Livestock Research Institute, Save the Children UK, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab and Community Jameel.
The aspiration was for the Observatory to enhance the preparedness of pastoral communities in East Africa to increasingly frequent and severe droughts.
The initial proposal emphasized the various elements that came to characterize the Observatory: an initial vision on a ‘networked approach’ to achieve progress, and an initial mission referring to ‘co-constructed and community-led research and data driven solutions’. Other key elements were reference to the diversity of actors that the Observatory would work with, capacity development front and centre, and communicating its work to the public, to professionals and to sponsors.
Challenge questions
As we established the Observatory, we were keenly aware that we were joining a moving train. The ideas of early warning, anticipatory action and forecast-based action had gained a lot of currency and a vibrant conversation was already underway among food security actors in the region. A degree of humility was needed to gain credibility and trust with the existing community of actors and to identify our niche and where we could add value.
The logic of anticipatory action was compelling and had been picked up strongly by Save the Children through their forecast-based action approach.
Another strand of thinking that influenced us was around co-creation, co-construction and innovation systems. The idea of linear research to development pipelines had been upended and the new thinking was about networked approaches, knowledge sharing, redressing power imbalances, listening to end-users, and innovation as an emergent property of diverse actor networks.
At the University of Edinburgh our fellow travelers were colleagues from the Data for Children Collaborative who had developed methods to co-construct research through ‘impact collaborations’. Within the CGIAR system, the co-construction ethos of the Observatory was influenced by the agricultural innovation systems thinking which was also a very active thought field within the World Bank.
These strands of influence led us to the idea of Challenge Questions to guide our activities. We saw this as a way to ensure that our research was driven by the needs of the community of actors working on the front line of food security.
We embarked on a process of settling on a series of Challenge Questions at our first in-person Community of Practice meeting in early 2022.
Questions were developed through a participatory process with a large group of stakeholders. Our initial aim was to agree on a series of tractable research questions that could form the starting point for our research and that would guide development of PhD project topics, commissioned research and potentially Impact Collaborations.
As the dialogue developed, the Challenge Questions became rather large and thematic. These were very big questions that would be aspirational but that would guide our scope of work.
The five questions focused on the themes of Data, Finance, Coordination, Trust and Localization.
Starting conditions are very influential and the Challenge Questions did provide a very useful touch stone which we returned to again and again over the life of the Observatory.
The extent to which we pursued these themes was variable based on their tractability but they did serve as guiding themes for ongoing activity.
Community of practice
From the beginning, a newly created community of practice was at the heart of the Observatory. To quote our programme proposal: ‘we foresee the core of the Observatory’s operations being a Community of Practice which will act as the forum for identifying gaps, commissioning research to fill those gaps, stimulating innovation and acting as a bridge between policy and research’.
The details of how this would function were unclear at the start, but the essence of the CoP became an annual in-person meeting in the region with online engagements to share learning, identify priorities, and advocate for more effective and appropriate actions in the drylands.
Our Community of Practice meetings became part of our brand. They were highly interactive, loose, fun, collegiate, informal, well-facilitated, well attended and very significant in shaping our agenda. They also included strong representation from pastoral communities themselves with senior people from pastoral backgrounds providing an authentic voice from communities.
The model set out at the beginning worked well. Most if not all of the ideas for research, dialogue and capacity development can be traced back to conversations at CoP meetings.
The CoP also served as a crucible to hone and redirect our activities on an ongoing basis, providing opportunities, for example, for our students and post-doctoral researchers to pitch and gain feedback on their plans and results.
Research that emerged from one meeting would be reported at the next. This gave credibility and substance to the conversations, with participants knowing that their engagement would lead to tangible outputs and outcomes.
The meetings also facilitated trusted professional relationships to develop; these were invaluable in allowing the fruitful partnerships that drove the day-to-day business of collaborating on Observatory activities.
Problem focus
A key strength of the Observatory and its funding model was flexibility of thought and action. Through a co-development process with our networks of stakeholders, we developed a strong theory of change which focused on the kinds of outcomes we were aiming at.
But the pathways to achieve these outcomes were deliberately loose and allowed us to listen and adapt our approach in the light of dialogues with knowledgeable experts and pastoralist communities.
One early evolution was to pivot from our initial plan to develop a data platform to support early warning/early action. In early discussions at our CoP meetings, the message was clear that a further digital solution would merely add to the many credible and mature platforms which were already in place, risking duplication and confusion. These included the well-established FEWSNET along with services run by regional platforms such as the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC).
Dialogue at CoP meetings and beyond indicated that the problem was not one of forecast skill and data availability, but one of data application/use. In early CoP’s much of the conversation revolved around the gap between data and action, and the need to translate regional data products into useful and actionable information at local/community level. As a result, much of our subsequent research targeted this issue including that of several of our PhD students, our commissioned research, an Impact Collaboration, and one of our Research Accelerator Projects.
A further growth in our thinking concerned our view of pastoralism and the pastoral way of life. Our initial rationale leant on the language of fragility and vulnerability. As the Observatory developed, we moved to a more positive narrative of resilience and adaptability. This was driven partly by trusted voices in our Community of Practice but also by research conducted by our PhD students and post-doctoral researchers.
We also evolved our thinking around anticipatory action: In early work, we accepted the approach as compelling and appropriate. Our aim was to develop the evidence base to persuade others that this was the approach to pursue.
Our research and dialogue led to a more rounded and in some cases, sceptical view. We began to ask questions about whether AA was indeed applicable in pastoral systems which are inherently uncertain and where a pastoralist superpower is navigating and harnessing uncertainty.
This thinking is still evolving and, with partners, we are developing a set of principles to apply the AA approach in pastoral settings.
Three mutually reinforcing tracks
As we grew, our activities began to coalesce around three core activities: Research, convening and capacity sharing. Research tended to lead but our theory of change made it clear that achieving our target outcomes needed a broader approach.
The success of our Community of Practice meetings led to many encounters with key decision makers who enjoyed stepping out of their routines to think more deeply about the various issues we were wrestling with.
Our engagement with Kenya’s PPG was particularly significant and led to opportunities to be at the heart of policy discussions, most notably through our background support for the 2024 Fourth Pastoralist Leadership Summit.
The resolutions emerging from that meeting were important and we have continued to engage in progressing them along with partners.
In addition to high level dialogues, we engaged with communities through dialogues with pastoralist leaders and other fora that helped to ground our thinking in the issues that mattered on the ground. This was helped by our appointment of Guyo Roba, a professional from a pastoralist background, as Head of the Observatory.
Capacity development was always in our plan but emerged as a strong demand at our CoP meeting in 2023. This eventually led to some significant groundwork to build consensus on key capacity gaps, learning principles and an educational framework. To build momentum on our capacity sharing agenda, we established the Dryland Futures Academy as a rallying point for various parties interested in collaborating on capacity sharing in the region.
The three tracks were mutually reinforcing.
- Our research credentials gave us the convening power necessary to bring key thinkers and decision makers together.
- Our convening activities generated ideas for research and helped to build the partnerships necessary to make the research relevant and, ultimately, taken up.
- Our research highlighted capacity gaps in terms of knowledge and practice that found their way into our educational framework for the Dryland Futures Academy.
These intersections, reinforced through strong partnerships and targeted engagement have provided the added value to make each more than the sum of its parts.
A mixed research portfolio
The flexibility in our funding model allowed considerable experimentation with different ways of doing research.
Our plan from the outset was to set research priorities through our Community of Practice. At the proposal stage, we saw the CoP as ‘identifying gaps, commissioning research to fill those gaps, stimulating innovation and acting as a bridge between policy and research’. Our initial schematic shows a series of research activities interacting with the Community of Practice in both directions.
Our core research was through PhD students. We began recruiting students early and consulted with Consortium members on relevant topics. As new cohorts were recruited, our Challenge Questions informed project topics and in recruitment.
We experimented with Impact Collaborations that recruited collaborators to tackle specific Challenge Questions.
We also experimented with open calls for research, through a series of ‘Research Accelerator Projects’. These were envisaged as picking up ongoing research and supporting its scaling with partners in the region.
We also built research through collaboration. Our work with the DRIVE programme and on climate shocks and conflict became part of our portfolio when Nathan Jensen joined. Our recruitment of two post-doctoral researchers was triggered during an early CoP meeting and led to joint Observatory-SPARC appointments of Samuel Derbyshire and Tahira Mohamed at ILRI.
We directly commissioned some research, notably with Save the Children, leading to the ‘Dangerous Delays 2’ report and learning on anticipatory action in an ongoing crisis.
This mixed portfolio research approach was useful in generating research at different paces from the protracted and deep model of PhD research through to rapid and applied commissioned research.
Theories of change
Throughout the journey, we relied on the Theory of Change methodology to help refine and guide our efforts. Our ToC was informed by deep engagement with key members of our Community of Practice and Advisory Group who helped to form and refine it.
This involved defining an overall Impact Statement, namely that ‘Vulnerable pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in target regions of East Africa are more informed, prepared for and resilient to the effects of evolving environmental shocks and stresses on their food security and nutrition’.
We worked backwards to identify different actor groups and how they would need to behave differently to contribute to our target impact – so called ‘outcomes’. We then used these aspirational outcomes to identify the types of outputs that the Observatory should generate to feed these outcomes.
The Theory of Change process was aspirational but did broaden our thinking on the types of actors we needed to engage with and helped to build a common purpose and approach.
It also helped the whole Community of Practice to think in ‘outcome mode’, i.e. to focus on activities that would lead to changes in behaviour and practice in support of the overall goal to of better prepared pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa.
Future directions
In June 2026, the current Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action ended.
However, the partnerships and ongoing work provide a strong basis for future work and the University of Edinburgh, ILRI and partners are working on a new ‘Dryland Observatory’ to pick up existing work including ongoing PhD projects, new grant-funded projects won on the back of the Observatory and ongoing funded projects aligned to the Observatory.
We look forward to establish a new identity with a fresh focus but also strong continuity with the research-policy-capacity interfaces created in the past five years.
