Collaborative Learning to Adapt RISE Programs to Emerging Best Practices

The Sahel Resilience Learning (SAREL) is a five-year project whose purpose is to provide monitoring, evaluation, collaboration and learning support to USAID's Resilience in the Sahel-Enhanced (RISE) initiative. RISE includes 28 USAID projects that are being implemented in the Sahel Resilience Strategy's zones of intervention in Niger and Burkina Faso, and that are jointly contributing to the achievement of the top line results outlined in the Sahel Resilience Strategy. 

In the past 15 months, the SAREL Team has successfully developed the RISE Resilience Mapping Database with data collected from 14 RISE projects on who-is-doing-where, which helped identify promising practices implemented in different communes and learning needs. It has launched the Sahel Resilience Community of Practice (CoP) which reached 381 members in August 2015 with members from government and non-government institutions in Niger, Burkina Faso, and beyond. It also co-organized collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) workshops in Niger and Burkina Faso with the government, bringing together a wide array of diverse stakeholders, and organized a CLA Training for RISE partners in Niger and Burkina Faso and shared a set of CLA tools, systems, and mechanisms to support systematic capturing, documentation, and sharing of the best practices and lessons learned. Also, importantly, it secured the buy-in of the Government of Niger and Burkina Faso to use CLA to strengthen their coordination role by systematically identifying, validating and scaling-up proven best practices of resilience practices and programs. 

This case study was submitted as part of USAID's CLA Case Competition, held in August 2015. Taken together, this collection of submissions illustrates the diversity of ways collaborating, learning, and adapting approaches are being operationalized in the field. Stringent judging criteria was used to determine official CLA Case Competition winners, so not all submissions should be considered an official USAID endorsement of best practice. To view all entries, visit the CLA Case Competition page.