In its second year the Observatory moved from establishment and agenda-setting to implementing a portfolio comprising action research by young scholars (both PhD students and post-doctoral scientists), impact collaborations on nutrition data and community-led early action, engagement with actors across the humanitarian, food systems and climate action spaces and with our community of practice, and communication and outreach. This post gives a brief update on the various activities carried out between July 2022 and June 2023.

Involving the University of Edinburgh through its Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems, Save the Children UK, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the International Livestock Research Institute and Community Jameel, the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action is centred around a Community of Practice involving food security actors in East Africa.

At its first meeting in 2022, the Community distilled five Challenge Questions that are being used to frame and guide the Observatory’s activities.

In its second year the Observatory has begun to develop a portfolio of research for action activities around its five Challenge Questions. These activities include work on better understanding local perspectives on drought early action, exploring the economics of forecast based action, examining triggers to early action, exploring links between emergency action and long-term resilience building and seeking to understand what anticipatory action looks like during a protracted crisis.

Theory of Change

Because of our strong aspiration to catalyse meaningful change in the early warning/early action area, we place much emphasis on our impact and how to achieve it. For this purpose, we embraced a Theory of Change (ToC) approach to help us identify what we want to achieve, and which activities and partners will help us move in the right directions. Working across the partnership, we have developed a framework that sets out our vision statement and the various outcome pathways leading to impact.

The Theory of Change (see figure below, working right to left) sets out our vision on how our work will benefit pastoral communities in East Africa. It then sets out the various stakeholder groups that we will work with to achieve our vision and it describes the types of behavioural change that are needed (outcomes). The ToC also indicates the types of interventions we need to engage in to achieve our stated outcomes. These include facilitating dialogue, generating evidence, building collaboration, enhancing capacities and engaging in policy formulation.  

Community of Practice

As set out in the original plan, the CoP is the core of the Observatory’s operational framework and is now well established as a driver of its research for action agenda. The CoP met for a second time in person in Nairobi on 9-10 May 2023. The meeting brought together 65 participants from 31 organizations and built on the foundations laid at the first meeting in April 2022. 

We were particularly pleased that discussions at our 2022 CoP meeting with the Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises (SPARC) programme evolved into a concrete collaboration.  Together, we are co-funding 2 post-doctoral positions that commenced their research in June 2023. One is working on humanitarian relief and resilience programming while the second is looking at triggers for anticipatory action. We regularly engaged with SPARC colleagues over the course of the year.

In May this year, the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action became a founding partner in a larger ‘Jameel Observatory’ architecture that also includes the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network.

Participants review and discuss action research

Communications, engagement and outreach

During the past year, we continued to evolve our communications and engagement activities, mainly from Edinburgh and increasingly benefitting from Guyo Roba’s position and networks, as well as his outreach and media activities, supported by Community Jameel.

During 2022, we ran a series of virtual ‘mini-dialogues’ to catalyse conversations on key issues in the early warning/early action discourse. Each was championed by an expert who made a short framing presentation. This was followed by group work to tease out the main issues and propose research gaps. The mini-dialogues have been a fruitful way to build partnerships, increase our visibility and inform our action research.

Our staff contributed to three podcasts in the past year: Guyo Roba in IFAD’s monthly podcast in August 2022; Alan Duncan, Guyo Malicha Roba and Gary Watmough contributed to a DDI podcast in September 2022; and Guyo Roba, Gary Watmough, and Stephen Mutiso contributed to an episode of ILRI’s Boma podcast in December 2022.

Outreach and media activities included:

  • Jun 2022: The Observatory co-organized a session on ‘Anticipatory action to tackle drought-induced crises: Acting on lessons from the 2021/2022 drought in East Africa’ at the 5th Africa Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action.
  • Aug 2022: Drought: We know what to do, why don’t we do it? Opinion piece in New Humanitarian
  • Aug 2022: Embracing early action a necessity for drought hit counties. Opinion piece in the Star newspaper.
  • Feb 2023: How loss and damage financing can help African communities with drought. Opinion piece in Environment Journal
  • Mar 2023: Drought killed 43,000 people in Somalia last year. Guyo Roba quoted in The Economist.

 

PhD programme

A cluster of talented PhD students is now in place – many from East Africa, contributing significantly to our capacity building activity.

  • John Mutua is employing earth observation approaches to build a better understanding of livestock feed availability, a crucial metric in pastoral areas (detail here).
  • George Tsitati is researching local responses to crisis events in East Africa and how these can be better linked to international efforts (detail here).
  • Puff Mukwaya is looking at the economics of forecast-based action (detail here).
  • Michael Renfrew is investigating opportunities to estimate livestock population numbers from space (detail here).

Post-doctoral fellows

We recruited two post-doctoral fellows based in the region. Both are employed by ILRI and co-funded with the SPARC programme.

  • Samuel Derbyshire will assess the triggers applied in drought early warning systems in Kenya and Somalia to evaluate the linkages between the trigger design, targeted actions, and the planning processes in response to drought risks (detail here).
  • Tahira Mohamed will focus on understanding the relationship and the synergies between humanitarian relief and resilience programming in the Horn of Africa through empirical cases. The overall aim is to address the disconnects between short-term humanitarian responses and long-term resilience programming within the Horn of Africa (detail here).

Grounding our analysis

To set our work in local realities and to build partnerships, we convened a set of meetings in the run-up to our second in-person CoP meeting. In early May 2023, a group of county-level actors involved in ‘local’ drought and emergency management met in Isiolo, Northern Kenya to distil lessons and insights from local drought and food security responses during the recent drought (read more).

This local dialogue was complemented by key insights shared during a parallel dialogue with pastoralist elders who shared their first-hand experiences in responding to recent drought (read more). They also discussed what worked and what did not work in drought responses, while exploring the future of drought responses.

A third conversation explored ways that available data on drought and food security impacts could be better managed and put to use (read more). The outcomes of these dialogues are being distilled to continue to shape our research agenda/outlook.

Groupwork at the Isiolo datathon [photo credit: Gary Watmough]

Impact collaboration on ‘Seasonal effects on nutrition surveys in East Africa’

We formed a partnership with the University of Edinburgh/UNICEF Data for Children Collaborative on a co-funded project looking at improving data integrity for child nutrition surveys that can be compromised by seasonal effects.

The project is a collaboration between Southampton University, University of Edinburgh, iLab-Nairobi (Strathmore University) and the Environmental Protection Agency in Ghana. The project is progressing well having identified 4 countries with time series data on child nutrition (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Nigeria), conducted a rapid review looking at drivers of child wasting, created a database using demographic health survey data on children, women and household characteristics related to child nutrition,  reviewed several geospatial datasets that could provide proxy indicators for drivers of child wasting and developed a prototype multi-level model on childhood wasting and seasonality.  Read an update on the project.

Capacity building

As set out in the Project Plan, our capacity building activities lie in two areas:

  • Developing a cohort of professionals in the region with skills in use of data for rural development through doctoral and post-doctoral programmes
  • Developing short courses for regional professionals drawing on skills within the partnership and capitalizing on University of Edinburgh digital learning capacity

Most of our effort to date has been in the first area and we have assembled a group of high calibre scholars who we anticipate will go on to be influential professionals in the food security early action space in East Africa. Our attention is turning to the second area and we convened a capacity building needs session at our recent CoP meeting in Nairobi.

Outlook

With a growing portfolio of research for action activities and an excellent community of researchers, our focus in year three will be on (1) research for action implementation, (2) building the funding base for expansion of our activities, (3) through targeted engagement and outreach, focus attention on the key issues in the interlocking climate-food-humanitarian and drylands spaces that frame our work and (4) raising the profile of the Jameel Observatory as a trusted and reliable partner in brokering science, knowledge, real-world action and inclusive solutions to environmental shocks and stresses facing dryland communities.

Download year 2 report

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