Fundación Capital, with the support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is currently carrying out a Graduation Project in… Read more Paraguay with a transformative gender-based approach within the framework of Programa Abrazo (The Hug Program) of the Ministry of Childhood and Adolescence. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project had to be modified and required design and activity adjustments for the different contexts in order to maintain ties with participants, even with preventive social distancing measures. Understanding the women’s reality during the pandemic was crucial to develop strategies to mitigate the socio-economic effects of the crisis. This is why Fundación Capital performed a study with 479 women from Programa Abrazo to know how the pandemic had impacted their personal economy and the strategies they had used to face the crisis. Read less ...

Blog post on behavioral, social and emotional side of refugee integration into the labor market that is often overlooked… Read more Read less ...

Often considered to be one of the most vulnerable countries to the climate change, Bangladesh faces threat to its natural… Read more resources, livelihood security and general wellbeing of the people owing to its topography and geographic position. Moreover, vulnerability increases because of the challenges the country faces in adapting to the changing climate and in mitigating the responsible climatic factors. Some regions of the country, such as Char, are more vulnerable to the changing climate than the other parts. Therefore, giving due attention to such areas becomes a mandate for the development partners working along with the governments. To address the livelihood vulnerabilities of the extreme poor population of the Char areas in Kurigram district, Concern Worldwide implemented the project named “Empowering Women and Youth through Graduation and Financial Inclusion (EWYGFI)” in two Upazilas (sub-district)—Kurigram Sadar and Ulipur. The field operation was implemented by Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS), while Trickle Up supported the project to channelize the funding from MetLife Foundation with their technical assistance in implementation. While implementing, the project perceived the necessity to understand the climate change-induced impacts on program participants in the project implementation area. Consequently, this study titled “Understanding the impact of climate change on poor and vulnerable Char people” was commissioned to DM WATCH. The purpose of the study was to identify specific climate-induced impacts affecting poor and vulnerable people living in the Char regions of Bangladesh and make recommendation on how future programming could better help people mitigate or manage climate-induced risk. Read less ...

The international community cannot work in silos and expect to end extreme poverty. Poverty is multidimensional. The most effective and… Read more powerful interventions that empower people to escape the poverty trap address the lives of people living in poverty holistically. A truly holistic approach leverages stakeholders from all parts of society collaborating to uplift people from the most marginalized communities. This is a matter of social justice, not of charity. And, this is urgent. By the end of 2021, COVID-19 will have forced approximately 150 million more people into extreme poverty. Despite dire circumstances, we can still make meaningful progress on poverty eradication. Before the pandemic struck, global extreme poverty was consistently falling. From 2011 to 2019 alone, it fell from 1.1 billion people to 691 million. Read less ...

Today, addressing food insecurity increasingly means addressing conflict and violence. Hunger is on the rise for the first time in… Read more decades, with conflict as a key driver, and conflict is on the rise too. Resilience and food security investments are increasingly focused on conflict-affected countries, from protracted crises in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, to the outbreak of new conflicts in places such as Ethiopia and Mozambique, to gang violence in Guatemala or Honduras. USAID has developed a policy brief to frame USAID work in this important space. Key takeaways include: 1. Fragile and conflict-affected contexts are areas—sometimes enveloping a whole country, sometimes highly regionalized or localized—of often violently contested governance where state capacity to provide order and public services is low and the social contract between citizens and government is either absent or broken. 2. Food insecurity and conflict are part of a vicious cycle, with conflict begetting food insecurity and food insecurity begetting conflict and fragility. Food insecurity can drive conflict by facilitating extremist or rebel recruitment with the promise of steady meals and employment or negative consequences for livelihoods among food producers and resultant conflicts over resources like land and water. Food insecurity and high food prices can catalyze urban protest and rioting, and inadequate policy responses to food crises erode government legitimacy. 3. Conflict can drive food insecurity through active food denial by parties to the conflict, mass displacement that leads to missed planting seasons or unharvested food, and disruption in access to markets through inaccessible roads and infrastructure. Given the nature of rising food insecurity today, it is important to lean into these contexts whenever development and humanitarian workers can, but doing so requires new approaches such as practicing conflict sensitivity. This means carefully understanding the context and the two-way relationship between activities and the context. Adapting reduces harm but also helps maximize opportunities for peace. There are time periods or regions of relative stability in the midst of conflict and fragility where development and humanitarian practitioners can find creative ways to leverage what is working well. 4. Development and humanitarian practitioners should work with and through local systems and partners. This might mean both formal and informal markets, as well as more kinds of informal governance and non-traditional local actors, including private sector actors. 5. Development and humanitarian practitioners should promote coherence across humanitarian, development, and peace assistance. This is crucial for working in fragile and conflict-affected places. 6. Development and humanitarian practitioners should think about success and related measurement approaches in new ways. Does the context shift development goals and theories of change? Does context shifts change which approaches make the most sense? Those goals might be more modest or focused on preventing backsliding for instance. Read less ...

The WBG blog unpacks the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugeesm and their economic recovery in Uganda compared… Read more to the host population Read less ...

Refugees have been supported by innumerable cash or voucher interventions implemented by international humanitarian and development actors during the Covid-19… Read more pandemic, but only a few of these have explicitly aligned or integrated with government social protection responses. Refugees residing in low- and middle-income countries have mostly been excluded from government social protection responses, and where they have been included (largely in Latin America and the Caribbean) this typically represents a continuation of pre-pandemic policy. This paper reviews the evidence on: 1. The inclusion of refugees in government-led social protection responses to Covid-19 in the Republic of Congo and Colombia 2. The alignment or integration of international humanitarian and development actors’ cash assistance to refugees and government social protection responses – focusing on Jordan and Pakistan. Read less ...

Annex to the case studies

To share learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Grand Bargain Cash Workstream Sub-Group on Linking Humanitarian Cash (HC) and Social… Read more Protection (SP) has drawn up a series of case studies that offer practical examples of how actors in a range of different contexts have aligned or linked elements of existing and/or nascent humanitarian and social protection approaches in cash-based responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Using concepts that have been captured in a combination of different theoretical frameworks, the case studies bring to life examples that show how a variety of stakeholders have linked different elements of HC and SP in COVID-19 responses and the successes and challenges faced in doing so. The case studies are organised around a combination of the humanitarian project cycle and the building blocks of the delivery chain. Learnings presented in this note have been drawn from the experience of sub group member agencies in several different countries. Case Study 3 looks at Implementation. Outreach and communications; information systems, registration and enrolment; payments/delivery; grievances and community feedback mechanism; transition and/or exit; monitoring and evidence. Read less ...

To share learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Grand Bargain Cash Workstream Sub-Group on Linking Humanitarian Cash (HC) and Social… Read more Protection (SP) has drawn up a series of case studies that offer practical examples of how actors in a range of different contexts have aligned or linked elements of existing and/or nascent humanitarian and social protection approaches in cash-based responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Using concepts that have been captured in a combination of different theoretical frameworks, the case studies bring to life examples that show how a variety of stakeholders have linked different elements of HC and SP in COVID-19 responses and the successes and challenges faced in doing so. The case studies are organised around a combination of the humanitarian project cycle and the building blocks of the delivery chain. Learnings presented in this note have been drawn from the experience of sub group member agencies in several different countries. Case Study 2 looks at Intervention design. Vulnerability and poverty assessments, informing eligibility/targeting design; transfer value and frequency; and conditionality. Read less ...