Engaging with technical and financial partners

CCAFS-ILRI Workshop on Communications and Social Learning in Climate Change

8-10 May 2012 ILRI Campus, Addis Ababa

Engaging with technical and financial partners

---

In this session made shorter by group work time, three representatives from donor agencies gave their insights about the work done in this workshop and how the ideas put forward might strike a cord with the funding priorities of their own agency. After that session, everyone mapped their own organization on a matrix between social learning theory and practice and climate change/food security theory and practice (and the kind of activities that each could propose vis a vis CCAFS).

Feedback from financial partners

IDRC

1. Communication and SL within the research process: To what extent do they move? Some researchers I worked with don’t take it up – others walk along with partners and share the design, identify the problems together. This makes the research respond to audience needs and increases alliances in the the research findings.
2. Feedback loops (at the beginning, midterm): Walk the journey with your partners in interpreting the data. How can we support the researchers within the CG system and outside? Potential area: convening and catalyzing. Researching communication and social learning. What are the methodologies we can use to instil feedback loops?
3. Scenario development group: making the scenarios meaningful to multiple partners would be interesting, looking at risk and impact assessment. How do they create meaning and how do they apply that?

DFID File:DfID Presentation.ppt

1. DfID is getting funding ideas where you see priorities;
2. We need a better understanding of demand – for better and more concrete outputs;
3. What are incentives for publishing?

USAID

1. Some of our projects have already taken up Social learning;
2. There are opportunities within the missions on the ground;
3. SL as a tool allows adaptation - this approach now has some space in the agency;
4. Funding will be tough within USAID in the coming years.

Mapping of 'technical' partners