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Game report: Reaching Resilience

Reaching Resilience game screenThe Medulin district, one of the scenarios in Reaching Resilience.

By Daphne Nadig *

In it, the player (you) takes on the role of a field worker in an imaginary context for a national NGO that has been working in Palombia (fictitious South American country) for a long time.

You’ve been nominated project coordinator of needs evaluation and design for a new program. You have to visit the other NGOs in the country, each responsible for a specific district, and understand their projects.

Unfortunately, these NGOs experienced certain difficulties while carrying out their projects. Your job is to understand their projects and identify the mistakes made so as to avoid them in your own future program.

For example, the NGO working on the Medulin district decided to build a dyke five years ago to provide an irrigation system for the farmers. At the time, everyone thought it would be a good idea, including the herders, the local authority and the weather station.

Everything was working perfectly until a major drought struck the area. The herders brought their cattle to the main river because the stream where they normally went was completely dry. But they passed the newly irrigated vegetable garden and couldn’t stop their cattle from eating what was growing. That created a problem with the farmers!

In the diagnostic phase of the project, this NGO had failed to take into account the herders’ use of the main river during major droughts. If they had done so, the conflict between the two communities could have been avoided.

The developers have created the RESILIENCE project “due to the belief that people’s capacity to cope with hazards and shocks would be improved if there was greater interaction between actors involved in the different fields of disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA) and poverty reduction (PR). This implies that the aid sector needs to focus on community resilience via a global approach which integrates these three different fields.”

The game is part of the RESILIENCE Toolkit. In it, there are also three videos that give an overview of the context of each case study (DDR, CCA and PR) and the REACHING RESILIENCE handbook.

* Daphne Nadig is a 14-year-old student who completed a two-day exposure
placement in the Sphere Project office in December 2014. Exploring and writing a report
about the “Reaching Resilience” game was one of her assignments.

  • Play the Reaching Resilience game.