USAID Ethiopia Resilience Learning Activity (RLA) Resilience Learning Agenda

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Ethiopia Resilience Learning Activity (RLA) supports USAID and its resilience partners (RP) in Ethiopia with learning, collaboration, and research
around resilience issues in Ethiopia. RLA provides a platform for thoughtful and informed integration of learning and adaptation into resilience programming. RLA seeks to instill a culture of iterative and intentional learning and evidence-informed decision-making, ensuring the meaningful engagement of end users and representatives at all activity stages; and disseminating information and lessons for reflection and application by ongoing and future endeavors.

A central pillar of RLA’s work is the development of and ongoing support to a community-informed
Resilience Learning Agenda – the document presented herein – to assist resilience IPs in appropriately orienting their interventions, reporting, and feedback loops to contribute to coherently explaining: What interventions (or combination/sequence thereof) are helping to build resilience at the household, community, and systems level?

RLA worked with the resilience community from March to June 2023 to develop this Learning Agenda, which will apply at the level of USAID’s multi-activity resilience portfolio and be an essential reference point for learning from and iteratively improving resilience-building efforts. The Learning Agenda will establish our common learning priorities; recommend methods for answering learning questions; focus communities of practice around topics that address common-priority learning questions; provide consistency to resilience definitions and measurement approaches; and be a dynamic tool that shifts with changing resilience priorities and emergent issues and needs.

The Learning Agenda provides a set of impact, portfolio, and intervention-level questions to guide
RLA’s learning work with the resilience community. As noted in its work plan, a shared learning agenda across USAID’s portfolio of resilience-building activities will provide a pathway to guide RLA and the Resilience Collective Action Platform’s progress toward results, orienting diverse stakeholders around standard benchmarks and a shared definition of success.

RLA intends that the Learning Agenda be posted as a page on the RLA portal to allow for easy
community engagement with the learning questions and information. Additionally, RLA plans to revisit the learning agenda at critical points across the project’s lifecycle – ideally, annually – and will use the portal to communicate lessons, findings, and community-led adjustments over time.