Building Resilient Communities in Somalia III (BRCiS III)

Building Resilient Communities in Somalia III (BRCiS III) Project

(FCDO-funded program)

BRCiS is committed to improving communities’ capacity to adapt to climate change while remaining grounded in their lived experiences of the impact of environmental degradation. The BRCiS III project will implement a series of layered and sequenced, mutually reinforcing outputs, designed to strengthen the systems most likely to support rural communities in Somalia to cope with high-impact shocks and stresses in the short term, and adapt to climate change in the medium to longer term. These systems include the local leadership systems, the natural ecosystem, market systems, and humanitarian and development systems. This new approach will shift the focus from community-based interventions in previous program cycles.

Project scope and aim

The objective of the BRCiS III project is that marginalized vulnerable communities in disaster-prone, rural Somalia have sufficient social, financial, and environmental assets to better cope with shocks and stresses and adapt to the effects of climate change. This is a key priority to FCDO funding interventions. BRCiS III works with 134 communities across Somalia.

This objective will be achieved through a set of multi-sectoral outputs, aligned around three system-level workstreams:

Workstream 1: Inclusive, Shock Responsive Leadership System (local leadership systems)
Workstream 2: Natural Ecosystem (local ecosystems)
Workstream 3: Economic Diversification and Financial Inclusion (associated with rural value chains as a subset of the Market System)

Modality

BRCiS is collaborating with ICRAF in the project inception phase that utilizes a mixed-method integrated baseline process. Specific activities will include:

Co-development of an ecosystem baseline methodology combining biodiversity and land degradation measurement baselines (using remote sensing, existing data from the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), laboratory soil testing, and other techniques) with an analysis of the social dynamics of natural resource access and use, including conflict;
training of BRCiS Consortium members and community representatives on field-based data collection. The baseline results will inform the targeting of resilience-building strategies and priority areas of intervention of the BRCiS project.

Timeframe

This is a multi-year project that will run from July 2023, until March 2028, as part of FCDO’s Humanitarian Assistance and Resilience Building in Somalia (HARBS) business case.