Participants at the end of Innovations Strategy Workshop (ISW) in Tamale, have identified WASH, Agriculture, and Financial inclusion, as areas of focusing efforts and resources to intensify education and community engagement to build resilience of affected persons.

The three-day WARILab Innovations Strategy Workshop (ISW), attended by experts in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), agriculture, NGOs and other climate-related fields, deliberated and clarified the processes for identifying, selecting and testing innovations that responded to the challenges identified during a qualitative study conducted earlier.

They also tapped into the collective expertise of WARILab network of stakeholders and collaboratively explored the complex challenges of rapid urbanization and food insecurity, which culminated into the development of the priority issues on which to focus efforts and resources.

WARILab is part of the Resilience Africa Network (RAN), a partnership of sub-Saharan African and American Universities, led by Makerere University in Uganda, which aimed at strengthening the resilience of people and systems in Africa, by leveraging the knowledge, scholarship and creativity that existed in partner universities, and funded by the USAID’s office of Science and Technology.

The University for Development Studies (UDS) has a sub-contract with Makerere University to host the WARILab, that included Mali and Senegal, with preliminary data collection activities including literature review, had helped identify rapid urbanization, climate change and food insecurity as priority thematic issues for the WARILab to address.

Mr Niagia Santuah, deputy director of WARILab, addressing participants at the end of the workshop, appealed to participants to renew their commitments in helping build resilience to better the lives of people affected by rapid urbanization, especially in the Tamale Metropolis, Ashaiman in the Greater-Accra Region, and the Kassena-Nankana Municipality, where qualitative data had been conducted by the lab.

He said Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Agriculture and Markets, as well as Financial Inclusion and Livelihood Diversification that the workshop developed, were areas of priority, which needed urgent attention to focus efforts and resources on, to improve the situation.

He said when collaborative ideas come together, positive results are bound to be achieved, and commended participants for their dedication to the workshop, which resulted in coming out with the final pathways that will now be developed into proposals to help address the problems.

Mr Santuah also commended the Ugandan and Senegalese facilitators for their hard work and levels of commitment, which arrived at the final pathways.

Dr Dorothy Okello, the Acting Director of Innovations of RAN from the Makerere University, expressed satisfaction for arriving at the final pathways, and expressed the hope that with dedication, fortitude and effective collaboration, the network could make a lot of impact in building resilience in communities affected by rapid urbanization.

The successful developing and design of the final pathways at the ISW, has paved way for the commencement of a Collaborative Resilience Innovation Design (CRID) Workshop, which started on Thursday.

CRID is a tool that provides technical details about the design of innovations, and a fast track process using the design thinking approach to facilitate a team of experts to co-create innovative projects.