Building Southern Africa's resilience to natural resource shocks

Genesis is the long-term monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) partner on the Resilient Waters Programme, a USAID's five-year programme in the Okavango and Limpopo river basins.

The programme aims to improve resilience and water security in the region by supporting key institutions, increasing access to safe, affordable drinking water, enhancing decision-making to respond to climate change, and improving management practices that mitigate threats to biodiversity. Resilient Waters focuses on seven countries – Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

In implementing the Resilient Waters Programme, Genesis forms part of a consortium led by Chemonics. Genesis is joined in the consortium by JG Afrika, the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) and the Peace Parks Foundation (PPF).

Over the past year, the MEL team has developed the programme’s theory of change and rolled out a 13-site baseline study. A key output of our work has been in how we define resilience in our footprint. Resilience is closely aligned to the level of social protection, the level of social cohesion, agency to make decisions and take action, and cultural heritage in communities.

The core focus areas for the team going into 2020 are:

• Evaluating capacity-building within Resilient Waters, partner organisations and grant recipients;
• Evaluating the programme’s fisheries, livelihoods, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), and Gender, Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) activities;
• Streamlining reporting processes;
• Aligning programmatic work to our theory of change; and
• Implementing our learning agenda, which includes dissemination and integration of knowledge products, collaboration with research and project evaluations, and evidence gap mapping.

The MEL team has established a community of practice on evaluating complex socio-ecological systems. For any information on this community of practice, please email resilientwaters@genesis-analytics.com.