From Survive to Thrive: Lessons from Resilience Building in Uganda

As the Chief of Party of the USAID/Feed the Future Integrated Community Agriculture and Nutrition (ICAN) project in Uganda, I have witnessed firsthand the immense potential of resilience building to transform livelihoods. Having worked in development for over 25 years in the ECSA region, I can attest that, unique from other approaches, a resilience perspective enables local communities to become stronger rather than merely survive.

USAID Uganda's flagship resilience program empowered thousands of households in vulnerable communities to thrive amidst inevitable shocks and stresses. Our team had the opportunity to be at the forefront to test, reflect, and learn how to build promising approaches to long-term resilience in Uganda. Our resilience efforts included improving social safety nets through group savings, increasing the adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices, and promoting dietary diversity and key WASH behaviors. Ultimately, we reached 116,000 households and 248,578 program participants, 78% of whom are female. Our success in this activity was grounded on our use of a facilitative, multi-sectoral approach, but we also tailored our responses drawing on three guiding principles:

1. A Whole-Person Approach 

For program participants, we looked at the whole person, addressing not only income, but any increases in education and health outcomes. Addressing both income and health, we introduced climate-smart agriculture innovations that addressed dietary diversity and increased household incomes while mitigating the climate crisis. For example, in Karamoja, a sub-region prone to prolonged drought and natural shocks, we promoted short-maturing crops such as iron-rich beans and green grams and saw community members increase their production acreage for consumption and market. When COVID-19 became a major shock, we never would have imagined the additional benefits of our WASH interventions as the pandemic spread.  In addition, ICAN's focus on building the communities' knowledge and capacities to grow and eat nutritious foods- including vegetables- addressed malnutrition, improving health outcomes of young children, pregnant and lactating mothers.

ICAN’s facilitative approach leaned into that truism; we worked through local governments, community leaders, and groups to provide services. We supported district governments to develop disaster management plans, helped community groups establish contextual processes through resilience committees, and identified governance champions to encourage community participation.

What Comes Next:

One of the things I am most proud of, is that our work is continuing even after the project's completion. Our local implementing partners have taken the ICAN experience and leveraged it for other opportunities to promote food security, enhance natural resource management practices, and reduce human-wildlife conflict. Many business service providers continue to work with private companies to offer basic agronomic extension services. These linkages have offered new buyers for previously marginalized farmers.

To assess the likelihood that USAID ICAN will have a sustained impact, we conducted an analysis towards the end of the project. We found that integrating interventions from across these key sectors and empowering people with knowledge and skills dramatically improves the chances that people will retain resilient behaviors in the future. All of this ratifies Abt's belief that solutions must be tailored to local contexts and that equity must be at the heart of those solutions. By working within existing systems and cultural contexts to build local capacity and, confront gender and power imbalances, we can ensure that communities and the most vulnerable are agents of their own change, are able to build the community-led resilience they need to thrive.