CAREC participates at the Stories of Change workshop
July 23-25, 2016. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Stories of Change workshop was organized by International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), under the framework of «Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia» (CARIAA).
The workshop brought together representatives from all four CARIAA’s programmes, such as: Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions (ASSAR); Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA); Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience (HI-AWARE) and Pathways to Resilience in Semi-Arid Economies (PRISE). The outcome of the event is that all sides agreed upon common story development plan, methodology and evidence-gathering strategy, necessary for developing the stories of change.
Stories of change are narratives that aim to illustrate a change, or a series of changes, which can be attributed, in full or in part, to the project’s intervention. They provide a documented account of a noteworthy change in an aspect of policy and practice, supported by direct or circumstantial evidence from which it is possible to either demonstrate or infer a plausible contribution. Building a story of change is about looking for the pieces of evidence/individual steps which show the change we are contributing to, it is about confirming that it is an actual change and it is about documenting it.
In this respect, stories of change are a key way of capturing, in a coherent narrative, impacts and changes instigated through CARIAA. As such, they can complement the outputs from monitoring and evaluation work.
Other benefits in terms of additional purposes the stories of change can serve to attract potential new donors to fund elements of a wider programme of work, as policy influencing/advocacy tools, to share pockets of success of the programme with a wider range of stakeholders for scaling up and learning, and as communication tools to inform a broader audience of progress and achievements.
The Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia (CAREC) implements research project within the PRISE, which is titled: “Migration, remittances, adaptation and resilience in arid and semi-arid regions of Tajikistan”. This research aims to study the links between remittances of migrants and resilience in arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL). The expected result of the research project is to provide the evidence to improve social and economic policies to support migration and remittances as an adaptation measure and secure long-term climate-resilient development of Tajikistan.
