Changing attitudes, changing lives: HIV, stigma and faith communities

by Hamish Wilson/

22.9 million[1] people across Africa are living with HIV. The social stigma associated with HIV means that for many people living with HIV is not just about their health, but also about their livelihoods, their home, community and family. Reducing the social stigma of HIV supports those affected by HIV to gain work, earn a living, live with those they care about, talk about their status, access the care they need, and ultimately to live with HIV. In turn, this increases the willingness of others to get tested, to discuss HIV prevention and hence to tackle the spread of HIV.

Reducing social stigma is hard. In many communities, faith provides the backbone to people’s attitudes and behaviour and so faith leaders and faith communities have remarkable influence over beliefs around HIV. By refusing to acknowledge HIV or through messages linking HIV with morality, faith can drive stigma. Consequently CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) in partnership with GNP+ (Global Network of People living with HIV) created the ‘Stigma Reduction Initiative’. This programme was launched in Kenya, Ethiopia and Zambia and used a peer to peer approach, based on people living with HIV ‘surveying’ others also living with HIV about their own experiences of stigma, discrimination and faith. The findings from the surveys were then shared with faith leaders who were supported to develop action plans to reduce stigma and discrimination in their communities.

Katie Chalcraft of Wasafiri Consulting was asked to evaluate the impact of the Stigma Reduction Initiative. We found a notable improvement in the HIV-related knowledge, attitudes and practices of the faith leaders involved in the initiative in the 3 pilot regions. More specifically, among the people living with or affected by HIV involved in the survey in Adigrat (Ethiopia) and Ibenga (Zambia) there was a general decline in exclusion from from social, family and religious activities, and improvement in the psychosocial aspects of peoples quality of life and increased uptake of HIV testing in the target communities.

For more information about Katie Chalcraft and her work please visit her profile here

Lead for CAFOD on this work was Georgia Burford. To learn more about CAFOD and their work with faith communities and on stigma reduction visit here

Dr Kate Simpson joins Wasafiri as Head of Development

by Ian Randall/

Wasafiri has recruited Dr Kate Simpson to be our Head of Development. She will lead an expansion of our work delivering change in Africa, and establish our office in Nairobi. Kate comes from Impact International, where she headed up their Relief and Development Group and was a consultant on leadership development, organisational change and sustainability for Impact’s corporate clients. Kate holds a PhD in Geography looking at the ethics of international development, and has worked across South America and Africa. If you are interested in working with or for Wasafiri, please get in touch with Kate at [email protected].

Southern Africa’s North-South Corridor ~ a model for regional integration

by Hamish Wilson/

Wasafiri Consultant, Ellen Hagerman, produced a report on the on-going challenges to the development and implementation of regional infrastructure projects in Southern Africa with a specific focus on the North-South Corridor. The report incorporates both information and analysis based on consultations with approximately 50 stakeholders working on or associated with regional infrastructure development in Southern Africa as well as with individuals and organizations that can provide further analysis and perspective to the context under which infrastructure is currently being developed in the region and on the continent.

The report also aims to incorporate relevant findings and recommendations stemming from a review of recent literature and initiatives that seek to identify and propose recommendations of ways to address the challenges and barriers to infrastructure development. The report is available here: DBSA Report on Challenges to Regional Infrastructure Development Final Report May2012

Rooting for resilience

by Hamish Wilson/

In keeping with the global shift towards recognising resilience as a vital component of humanitarian and development work, Christian Aid has embraced resilience-building as key to achieving its overall vision of eradicating worldwide poverty.

Enshrined in its 2012 Partnership for Change strategy as the power of individuals and communities to live with dignity, responding successfully to disasters, opportunities and risks they face, Christian Aid realised that significant changes were needed at an operational level to translate this concept of resilience into effective programming.

Wasafiri was called on to support Christian Aid in meeting this challenge by helping to plan and deliver a workshop in April 2013, bringing together programme staff from over 25 countries to share learning and best practice on resilience. Key lessons and actions were generated in the areas of integration, empowering analysis and planning, adapting Christian Aid’s Resilient Livelihoods Framework to context-specific risks, and measuring the effective performance of the Framework.

Armed with these invaluable insights, participants left the workshop committed and empowered to pioneer Christian Aid’s resilient livelihoods work in their day-to-day efforts to combat poverty around the world.

Click here for blogs, photos and videos from the workshop.

Strengthening the fight against HIV in Southern Africa

by Hamish Wilson/

With dramatic changes taking place in the nature of the HIV epidemic since the introduction of antiretroviral therapy, and consequent shifts in the global response to HIV (together with the onset of donor fatigue), Catholic aid agency CAFOD recognised the need to strengthen its HIV response in the global HIV hub of Southern Africa through a dedicated regional strategy.

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Wasafiri has been instrumental in developing that strategy with CAFOD and its partners. As an initial step in this process, Wasafiri undertook a review in 2013 of CAFOD-funded HIV programmes run by 13 partners in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, formulating recommendations for ways to strengthen CAFOD’s HIV work in the region. Wasafiri also designed and facilitated a partner workshop in Zambia to validate the findings of the review, and was tasked with compiling the outcomes of the workshop and developing the regional strategy.

The strategy produced provides guidance to CAFOD staff and partners in their efforts to address the evolving challenge of HIV in Southern Africa by shaping CAFOD’s organisational and programmatic response to HIV in the region for the next three to five years.

Taking into account the intervening changes in the epidemic and the local contexts of the countries identified, the strategy outlines appropriate adaptations to programming and partner support to ensure the gains already made in Southern Africa in the fight against HIV are maintained and further advanced.

The Significance and Magic of Slowing Down

by Martin Kalungu-Banda/

Introduction

Slowing down is an amazing way of creating conditions in which a system accomplishes what “it” is seeking to achieve in a faster and more effective way. By system I mean ‘self’ as in individual person, or a group of people or an organisation. For some reason, we have tricked ourselves into thinking about ‘speed’ as a virtue. It is like the faster you do things the more you are assumed to be effective. The reality is often very different. Speed creates inattention to what really matters and imprisons people into the proverbial hamster-wheel. In its wheel, the hamster runs very fast and gets the impression that it is going somewhere. In reality, the hamster is simply in the same place.

In this brief article, I share what I have witnessed in the last two months with regard to how ‘slowing down the system’ may lead individuals and groups to deeper understanding and more creative responses.

Different groups and contexts…

In the last week of April 2012, I was in Abu Dhabi where I had the opportunity to co-lead a process involving forty emerging leaders from seven Arab and three European countries. The emerging leaders were seeking solutions to the challenge of youth unemployment. In four days, the leaders (participants) came up with five ICT (information and communication technology) based innovative ideas for prototyping how to reduce youth unemployment. What do I think allowed the emerging leaders coming from different countries and cultural backgrounds to accomplish what they did in four days?

At the beginning of May 2012, I had the privilege of working in Argentina with over 70 incredibly talented emerging leaders from one of the world’s leading banks. In seven days, the bankers sought to understand the needs of local businesses and community based organisations and provided solutions that the stakeholders felt were truly game-changing. In one experience, a local business was passionately looking for ways of scaling-up their work without reneging on their commitment to environmental sustainability and the values that intimately connected them to their stakeholders. What do I think enabled the bankers understand so deeply and incisively the needs of their clients and provided such invaluable solutions?

In the third of week of May, I was in Zambia co-facilitating a course in Organisation Development. The course focused on ‘Intervention Strategies’ and the participants were middle to senior managers from business, public and civil society sectors. In real-time, the participants practised how to intervene in different situations through the intentional use of ‘self’. They used real life situations to practice the principles and values they were learning about. At the end of the four-day course, many participants marvelled at their own capacity to generate positive results and bring about a different (desired) reality. What do I think permitted the course participants to have such a deep experience?

In the first week of June, I was in Brussels co-leading a training programme for consultants and managers seeking to develop their skills in facilitating profound change at personal, group, and organisational levels. At the end of the three-day programme, participants felt that they had gained practical skills of how to enable profound change happen. Many participants shared that they had experienced a personal transformation in the way they thought about and practised ‘systems change’. To what do I attribute this perceived transformation?

Same approach….

My colleagues and I who worked on the above assignments ensured that the design of the processes we used deliberately included the following key ‘ingredients’:

Deepening quality of attention of participants

We (facilitators) created an opportunity for participants to engage in short and yet very deep reflections at several junctures each day. We called this ‘attention practice’. The assumption we worked with was that many people, especially those in leadership positions, do not have adequate opportunities to reflect on their work, their work’s impact, and the possible futures they are contributing towards or simply facing. The three minutes of silence were followed by another three minutes of journaling. In the three minutes of journaling participants wrote in their notebooks or journals or drew mind-maps or any other way of expressing their reflection or insights on paper. Journaling was followed by a sharing of insights in pairs or small groups.  Most participants expressed surprise, wonder and gratitude for value they discovered from intentional silence and journaling.

Attending to ‘Self’ as an Instrument

Through intentional silence and other techniques (that included peer feedback, personal assessment, practising techniques for growing one’s presence); participants experimented with using themselves as ‘instruments for the change they wanted to see’. This meant that participants needed to be aware of the inner intent from which they operated, and chance they had to re-calibrate that intent. They would then make the intent come through the way they communicated and conducted themselves. From time to time, facilitators created conditions and exercises that invited participants to practice how to use ‘self’ in the highest order with intent: being self-aware, being aware of the situation that needed their intervention, taking into account the needs of other stakeholders (human and non-human), choosing the intervention strategy to use at a given moment, and then calling upon the best of themselves to take action.

Backroom work…

I attribute part of the above success to the backroom work that we did as facilitators. In all the cases I have share here, we – the facilitators – faithfully practised mindfulness, gave feedback to one another and made ourselves vulnerable in the moment of the processes in order to model what we were inviting participants to be and do. Daily, we woke up very early in order to meet and practice meditation and journaling together. I also know that at individual level, all facilitators held the deepest positive intentions in service of our participants. Fascinatingly, participants sensed what we were putting in behind the scenes. They remarked, “As facilitators, you glide so perfectly with one another”; “You combine so well, it is like you have worked together for years”; “You are so spot-on with your interventions, you must be very alert”; and “We can feel how much you want us to be successful even when you are not saying anything”.

Holding the best deepest intention for a group one is privileged to support, in my view, is one of the primary roles of a facilitator. Our backroom work was our way of heeding the wise counsel of former chief executive officer of the Hannover Corporation, William O’Brien, who once said, “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener”.

Conclusion

I am of the opinion that it was the carefully orchestrated movement between deep moments of ‘attention practice’ and the willingness to experiment to use ‘self as an instrument’ that, in the main, enabled the nearly 200 leaders I have been privileged to work with in the last two months achieve the level of creativity and the results I have referred to in 2.0 above.

A combination of attention practice and intentional use of ‘highest self’ has the potential to enable people access the sort of intelligence that they do not often tap into. The two practices create conditions in which the human capacity is brought to the fore. When I was on my flight from Belgium, I was reading Joseph Jaworski’s book entitled Source. One of the arguments that Jaworski makes in Chapter 26, based on scientific data, is that our intelligence as humans does not just lie in the our brains, but in our hearts and guts also[1].  Now we know (what many traditional communities intuitively knew long before being contaminated by Western civilisation and logic) that the sort of neurons and neuro-chemicals that we previously only associated with the brain can also be found in our hearts and guts. This re-discovery proves that complex processes of ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’ do take place in our hearts and guts, just as they do in our brain. Studies are showing signs that the heart sometimes perceives future realities a little earlier than the brain. Exciting prospects of how we might start working with the concept of visionary leadership.

In conclusion, I make the argument that practising and deepening our attention through intentional silence and constantly sharpening the tool of ‘self’ are a cocktail that has phenomenal ability to increase our intelligence and capacity for innovation. We sharpen the tool of ‘self’ by practising personal reflection or mindfulness, seeking feedback from those around us, and being deliberate about choosing the presence we bring to our clients and interventions.

 

[1] Joseph Jaworski, Source. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2012, pages 127.

What enhances innovation? Lessons from my work in Abu Dhabi

by Martin Kalungu-Banda/

Introduction

Youth unemployment is a challenge in many parts of the world. The phenomenon of growing armies of unemployed young people is an alarming reality for governments and all people concerned with the well-being of society. I was in Abu Dhabi from 21st to 27th May 2012 working under the auspices of Common Purpose’s Itijah Venture (which means direction in Arabic). Itijah Venture brought together 40 emerging leaders from seven Arab and three European countries to grapple with the challenge of how to multiply, through information and communication technology (ICT) and social media, youth enterprises as a way of reducing unemployment among young people. Common Purpose invited me to co-design and co-facilitate the Itijah Venture. In this article, I share the key learnings I picked with regard to facilitating an innovation process.

The Results of Itijah

At the end of the week, Itijah Venture participants produced six prototyping ideas that they felt could significantly contribute to the reduction of youth unemployment in Europe and the Middle East. The six ideas were designed to leverage young people’s attraction to and use of ICT and social media. In the next few months following the Abu Dhabi meeting, participants will continue thinking together and developing the ideas into practical and living prototypes as a way of learning how to create large numbers of youth led/managed enterprise and jobs.

Process

The Itijah Venture process began a few months prior to the meeting in Abu Dhabi. The first step was taken when the Itijah Venture Advisory Board set the challenge as stated above. In many instances, training programmes simply take people away from their normal life activities and, for a few days, make them learn about tools, techniques and practices of leadership. This is not enough for imparting practical skills. Common Purpose, over the years, has learnt that the best way to run leadership development programmes is by locating the training within a particular challenge that is crucial to the client organisation or a group of people. In this way, the return on investment in training has greater chances of being realised and measured than when training and problem solving are done separately.  

The second step was the identification of emerging leaders to participate in the programme and sending them to gather data about the challenge. As soon as the candidates were selected, they were asked to go to “places of most potential for learning about the challenge”. Candidates went out to interview individuals or groups and observing situations where they could quickly learn about the challenge: what it is, how it manifests itself, what attempts have been done to resolve it; lessons picked from these attempts; and what stakeholders in the challenge fee can be done to resolve it. This is also known as sensing journey or learning through the eyes of stakeholders.

Upon arrival in Abu Dhabi, participants were introduced to and made a committed to certain ways of working that maximised collaboration and collective thinking. After the effective working atmosphere was established, participants went through a process of sharing the lessons they had picked during their sensing journeys. During the following two days, participants continued their sensing journeys by listening to subject matter specialists, entrepreneurs, and visiting places where they could learn through observation. Towards the end of the third day, participants started making sense of the information or data they had picked since they were accepted on the programme. On the final day, participants working creatively in small groups built sculptures that represented the ideas for prototyping. Participants played consultants to one another by challenging each other’s ideas, testing whether the ideas game changing.

Key Lessons

The following are the key lessons I picked from Itijah innovation process:

  1. Working in the moment: on the second day, one of the participants asked, “how come we are talking about youth unemployment and we do not have young people who are facing or will soon be facing unemployment?” My co-facilitator, Karen, and I knew instantly that we needed to find young people. Fortunately, one of the participants was from within Abu Dhabi. After a few phone calls we had three amazing young people who joined us. Their perspectives and ideas transformed the way we were looking at the challenge. One female youth said to the group, “Stop thinking like adults. See the world through our eyes, then you will stumble on ideas that may be helpful to us.” I learnt that when you are innovating, you need to work in the moment – make decisions as the situation unfolds. Innovation does not work when you are bent on ‘implementing’ the programme as you designed it.
  2. Value of Diversity and multi-stakeholders: Although the group of participants was reasonably diverse in terms of regions, gender, cultures, and age (to some extent), we did not pay attention to the importance of involving the most important key stakeholders – the unemployed youth themselves. I learnt that you need multi-stakeholder representatives to create conditions for coming up with new ideas that have a chance of working.
  3. Sensing and new knowledge: In their feedback at the end of the process, a number of participants admitted that they did not believe they could come up with ‘clever’ ideas on a subject matter they had no expertise in. They were pleasantly surprised that in the end they came up with ideas that ‘outside experts’ who came to listen to sculpted concepts thought could significantly contribute to enterprise development and job creation. I learnt that when you genuinely open your mind and go out and listen to and observe (sensing) the practical experts, every group can come up with innovative ideas.
  4. Staying with the problem long enough: from the first day in Abu Dhabi, a number of participants wanted to dive into brainstorming the possible solutions. My co-facilitator and I kept on encouraging them to focus on trying to understand or experience the challenge. This needed managing because some of the participants proudly described themselves as “action oriented”. They were worried that we would leave Abu Dhabi without coming up with any meaningful solutions. We invited them to stay with the challenge a little longer. At the end of the week, the “action oriented participants” were surprised at how easy creative ideas came towards the end of the process. I learnt that creative solutions tend to come with ease when you stay with the problem long enough. Jumping to solutions does not help.

Conclusion

Collective intelligence is possible and repeatable when a good (proven) process is followed, a diverse group is convened and key stakeholders are involved. 

 

How to revive the true spirit of Public Service

by Martin Kalungu-Banda/

Introduction

Zambia has won the Africa Cup! What can my country’s latest achievement in football teach us about how to rekindle the spirit of Public Service? Does it take more than politicians to inspire a country? What are some of the missing elements in our effort to attain our desired standard of living for everyone? Are we paying the right level of attention to all those areas that are necessary for driving national development? These are some of the question I have been reflecting on as I write the subsequent paragraphs.

Many people would agree that national development needs committed political leaders and a robust or thriving private sector. Political leaders are largely responsible for initiating the laws and policies that govern the use of national resources (human and otherwise). The business sector is best suited to generating much of the wealth we need to attain the quality of life we feel everyone deserves. We can also easily see the contributions of civil society in making politicians and businesses accountable. The power of civil society showed itself in a very significant and extraordinary way when a number of governments collapsed in 2011 in what has come to be known as the Arab Spring. The Occupy Movement has also demonstrated civil society’s determination to influence a re-think of the role of the private sector in society. The entertainment and sports industry give us a glimpse of what we can do if we drop all our pettiness and focus on what unites us. Our performance in the just ended Africa Cup which has seen us emerge African Champions, for instance, shows that we can break new grounds if we push our boundaries just a little further.

I am of the opinion that we do not often sufficiently see and acknowledge the significant role that a truly committed and skilled Public Service plays in national development. By Public Service I am referring to the Civil Service (managerial/administrative of government) and all parastatal bodies or any other institutions that are set up by government to serve the citizens of a country.

Is the Spirit of Public Service dead?

Working in many African countries partly gives me the impression that the spirit of service in the public sector is dying. You begin to see this from airports of certain countries. You meet immigration officers and airport staff that show on their faces that they are at pains attending to you. They would rather be elsewhere.

You get similar experience as you go to the Ministry of Lands to follow up on your application for a piece of land you would want to acquire. The public servant sitting on the other side of the table looks very disinterested in attending to you. His attention is split between attending to you and listening to the small radio on his table. The story is the same when you rush to a clinic or hospital because you have suspected malaria. The officers attending to you are unable to hide their displeasure in the work they do. Things get a lot nastier when you go to the police station to report an incident. You are ridiculed for having your items stolen and then given a lecture on what you should do next not attract thieves.

In the end, you feel like you must inform the more senior public servant who might see things from a policy perspective. If you are lucky to be given an appointment with the ‘big boss’, you meet someone who is immaculately dressed, carrying more than one mobile phones and constantly answering both the mobile and land phones. In the end the big boss casually says, “I will ask someone to look into your issue”.

How can the true spirit of Public Service be revived?

Part of what it would take to revive the spirit of Public Service in developing countries is to make working in the public sector a prestigious experience. This has been the case before in Zambia and many other countries. To some extent, developed countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States have managed to make their Public Services environments where people who feel the need to contribute to their countries in a particular way seek to work – at least for a period of time in their careers. The Public Servants I have had the opportunity to work with in Rwanda display, with grace, great enthusiasm and exceptional professionalism.

What is it that makes the Public Service a prestigious environment to work in?

  • Perceived to be uniquely professional: When the Public Service is perceived by the general public to carry out its functions in a uniquely professional way, it gives a good feel to those who work in it. This perception becomes an attraction to young and accomplished talent. It must be easy for us to imagine how many young children in Zambia will in the next few years dream to play professional football after seeing the magic our National Team displayed in the last few weeks in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Many workers enjoy being seen as a special group of professionals – people who know how to perform their functions with great and exceptional distinction. The label “professional” in the Public Service comes from years of specialised training in and experience of how to make the bureaucracy (used in the positive sense of an instrument for making government achieve it reason for existence and objectives) function as effectively as possible.
  • Public Servants viewed as individuals with a special vocation: Working in the Public Service is and must be made to look as a special vocation. The Public Service is a special vocation in that it ought to attract people who have a special inclination to using their giftedness to serving the interests of their country. Public Servants are expected to be individuals who can be trusted with the privilege of wielding state powers, not for self-interest, but in service of the public-interest. In comparison to people who serve in other sectors, Public Servants carry a lot of powers to suspend, stop, and encourage the activities (and even existence) of other sectors.  It is expected that the men and women who work in the Public Service will not use these special powers in any manner other than promoting the public-interest.  
  • Recruited from among the best: When the Public Service is perceived as a special vocation in service of the country, it acquires the capacity to recruit its staff from among the best in the country. Sufficient numbers of young men and young women who are top of their classes in colleges and universities compete for their entry into the Public Service. Accomplished professionals in others sectors find it prestigious to be invited to offer their services – on a temporary or permanent basis – in the Public Service.
  • Quality working environment: Those dedicated to the service of their country must work in fitting conditions. They must have the physical environment that permits them to think hard about the needs and challenges of the country. It means their offices must not be over-crowded and full of dilapidated furniture. The equipment and technology must be top of the range to enable efficiency to be an obvious part of the culture of the Public Service.
  • Reasonably remunerated: Although Public Servants have a special vocation to serve their country, they need to be reasonably remunerated. This does not mean they should have conditions of service that are equal to those who work in the profit oriented private sector (although where conditions permit people must be remunerated as well as possible). There should be creativity in how to create attractive conditions of service for public servants. A healthy pension scheme, good working environment, quality facilities, the prestige that comes with the sector, and opportunities for professional development, among other sources of motivation and inspiration help to build the notion of worthwhile remuneration or reward.
  • Acknowledgement and encouragement from leaders: Public servants are often ridiculed and used as a scapegoat by leaders in situations of failure or underperformance. While this will definitely occur from time to time, public servants must be acknowledged and encouraged openly and publicly by political and other leaders for good they do. Acknowledgement and encouragement in word and deed invites the best in public servants. Leaders have an obligation to build a healthy and genuine positive perception of the Public Service.

Conclusion

Zambia, as a nation, has evidently found a way to inspire our national football team to great success. How can we transfer our learning to the way we run our public institutions? I suggest that we find ways to make the Public Service attractive to the best men and women with a calling to serve their country in this special way. Having had the opportunity to serve my country as a civil servant at Parliament, a lecturer at the University of Zambia and an adviser to the President, I have witnessed the significance of the work that public servants do. I have a lot of respect for those who consciously choose to serve their country by working for government or its sub-systems.

The honour of waking up every day and thinking about how best to use the instruments of the state to promote the interests of the country and fellow citizens gives immeasurable reward even before the pay roll is run. It is an incredible responsibility to know that what I do on a daily basis as a public servant affects whether the farmer gets his her fertiliser or not; that my work is directly related to the health of children, women and the rest of society; that how I spend my day in the office can determine the education level of a child; that how I perform in my job has an impact on the quality of infrastructure my country has; and that my work contributes to whether some families sleep hungry or have enough to eat. Being a faithful, efficient and effective Public Servant is one of the noblest of vocations one can be called to in life.

Moments of Change for 2012?

by Hamish Wilson/

As we head into 2012, Wasafiri is asking where tipping points might lie for tackling poverty and related crises.

The future is uncertain. Of that much we’re sure. We live on a small planet with 7 billion people competing for rapidly diminishing resources, clamouring for greater political participation and a higher standard of living. New technology is stirring revolution and geopolitical power is shifting dramatically – all amidst a changing climate and an unprecedented economic crisis.

Such an outlook suggests that crises from conflict to climate change will be unpredictable in where and how they strike, but that we can expect the world’s poor to bear the greatest burden.

Yet amidst this volatility, we believe that new opportunities for tackling such problems will emerge in 2012. And it is often out of the most chaotic and dynamic moments that energy for thinking and acting in new ways begins to emerge. Wasafiri operates at the heart of such moments, working with the people and organisations tackling poverty and related crises. From our privileged vantage point therefore, we take the plunge to consider where opportunities for change may emerge in the year ahead:

Myanmar – capitalising on recent developments to strengthen democratic reform and respect for human rights
Horn of Africa – defining a long-term approach to improving resilience and development in the aftermath of 2011’s worst humanitarian crisis
South Sudan – tackling tribal and political conflict and strengthening government reform in the world’s newest country to lay the foundation for long-term state building
Somalia – tackling the blight of piracy, fundamentalism and poor governance in the world’s most dysfunctional state
Climate change – prototyping new approaches to reducing vulnerability and mitigating the impact of climate change at a country level
African agriculture – accelerating development by growing private sector investment in support of national plans and priorities
Libya – establishing leadership and government capacity for rebuilding the nation
Rwanda – supporting Rwanda’s hunger for development and regional status by strengthening the institutions of government
Afghanistan – supporting the transition from foreign military occupation to Afghan owned social and economic development
Humanitarian leadership – tackling pervasive weaknesses in leadership and coordination, on the back of a resurgence of high-level support for improving the humanitarian system

We also think it worthwhile keeping a keen eye on;

Arab Spring in Africa? – the upheavals of the Middle East and North Africa may well spawn similar discontent further south, where dictators in countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Angola cling to power as protest movements become more determined
Yemen – a disastrous convergence of poverty, extremism, ethnicity and corrupt government is forcing a growing political will for change
Non-traditional actors – developing nations and the West will grapple with how best to work with the likes of China, India and Brazil to strengthen aid and trade while avoiding the pitfalls
Humanitarian crises – predictably, from hurricanes in the Pacific to famine in the Sahel (especially Niger), new humanitarian crises will curse the developing world, but at ever-increasing cost
Ownership of development – opportunities will lie in building the capacity of national governments to reclaim their own development agenda, shifting power away from the donors
Impact investment – the private sector will increasingly be challenged – and encouraged – to structure and catalyse investments to drive development
Youth engagement – harnessing the energy of young people will also loom larger on the agenda of poor countries plagued by unemployment and increasing numbers of dissatisfied youth

Above all, and turbulent as the world may prove to be in 2012, we predict all manner of new paths to generating concerted action to tackle poverty and related crises.

Bon courage to all fellow travellers!